GenWeekly, Vol. VII, No. 10
It's Genealogy. It's Weekly. It's GenWeekly.
March 5, 2010
Elisabeth Lindsay, Editor
All articles are copyright (c) 2009 Genealogy Today, LLC.
This Week's Articles
The original article(s) in this section are available only to subscribers. You can learn about our $9.95 annual subscription at http://www.genweekly.com/subscribe.html.
by Jean Hibben. Presenting the origin for a lot of the very pithy words in our vocabulary.
by Judy Rosella Edwards. Incorrectly identifying a relationship can lead a researcher down the wrong path.
Recent News
- Is Alice in YOUR family tree? One enterprising genealogist decided to trace Alice's family tree.
- Document traces six generations back for some 200 colonial families. A "treasure trove" of colonial data documenting some 200 immigrants of Plymouth, Massachusetts and New Amseterdam (present day New York) has been discovered and is now being offered for sale.
- Library of Michigan to Lose Genealogy and Federal Document Holdings. Facing severe budget cuts the Library is now forced to narrow its scope and lose its support for genealogy and federal documents.
The Genealogy Guide
In the interest of helping readers gain better insight into genealogical terms, Genealogy Today has created a Genealogy Guide. Each week, GenWeekly features a new term from the continually expanding Genealogy Guide.
A matriarch is the female head of a family or tribe. Derived from the Latin "mater" meaning "mother," the matriarch is often the eldest surviving female within a family such as a mother or grandmother. Thus, the word "matriarchal" gives reference to female or mother as opposed to patriarchal which gives reference to male or father.
In some cultures a female is considered the family head and title is traced through the female line. In genealogy, researching the matriarchal or mother's ancestral line and can be challenging at best in cultures where women took the names of their husbands and women had such few legal rights. The mitochondrial DNA test (mtDNA) refers to DNA passed from mother to child, both daughters and sons and is used to trace one's deep ancestry.
Archive Articles
For additional reading on the topics covered in this week's newsletter, you may wish to read the following articles from the GenWeekly archive:
Copyright © 1999 - 2010 by Genealogy Today LLC, All Rights Reserved
<< Home