Two years ago, I asked my husband for an automal DNA test for Christmas. I wasn't sure I could trust a company with something as personal as DNA, but my mother and her siblings had passed on, as had my parental grandparents. While I'm far from old, I had questions about our ethnicity and heritage and it was up to someone in my generation to find the answers. We ordered the test through Ancestry.com and I received my results on Christmas Eve.
Since that time, I've learned a lot about myself and our past. I'm a direct descendant of Squire and Sarah Boone, parents of Daniel (his older sister Sarah is my 6th great grandmother.) I barely believed it when a Boone researcher/distant cousin broke the news to me. I kind of believed it when I found the lineage in the Daughters of the American Revolution genealogy database. I was finally convinced when all this evidence was backed up by more than a hundred DNA matches to fellow Boone descendants. DNA matches also helped me solve a mystery on my paternal line and proved a supposed 3rd great grandfather indeed was not the father of my 2nd great grandfather. (I'm a Witt, not a Johnson.) Since supposed great grandfather left the boy and his mother, who later married the real father, I'm guessing he knew that.
However, I don't know a lot about my mother's maternal line, so this week I took the mtDNA test. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down to the children from the mother, so this will trace my female line perhaps as far back as a thousand years or more. I can't wait to learn what answers I'll find and what new mysteries will present itself when I get the results.