Bob Batz Jr. of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has written an interesting story about Megan Smolenyak and her involvement in applying DNA to genealogy studies. You may recall that I recently reviewed the book, "Trace Your Roots With DNA" that Megan wrote with Ann Turner. (You can read that book review at http://eogn.typepad.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2004/11/trace_your_root.html.)
In this article Batz writes, "Say you get to visit the old country to explore your ancestry. You might think to take something to give your relatives. But would it be a DNA test?
"Genealogy, it is a-changing. Research is going genetic.
"'Genetealogy' is what genealogist and writer Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak calls it. That's her real name, as she is by birth and by marriage Smolenyak, a surname that hails from the town of Osturna in Slovakia. She had identified four lines of Smolenyaks and traced them back to the 1700s but couldn't find a connection among them. When DNA testing became available to the public in 2000, she used it to determine that none matched and, further, that one line was actually Vanecko."
As more and more genealogists bring DNA testing into their ancestral searches like Megan's, perhaps some of those brick walls will crumble with the help of genetic results.
You can read the entire story at http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05039/454179.stm.
