A place on the mitotree

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Venice, CA. 7 Mar 2022.

In July I asked my cousin Catherine on my Mom's Campuzano side of the tree if I sent her a mtDNA kit from FamilyTreeDNA, could she take it to help us identify the mitochondrial haplogroup for our shared maternal line descending backward from Maria Jesus Vasquez (for a color enhanced photo, see this post from 2022). She agreed, and a little over two months later, we now have an answer.

mtDNA is passed down on the maternal line. While men and women both inherit mtDNA from their mothers, men do not pass down their mtDNA. For the descendancy chart above, all of the women descending from Reyes Valdes, my 5th-great-grandmother, will share the same mtDNA haplogroup, along with all the children of Maria Jesus Vasquez. Ana Maria Orosco and Maria Jesus Suastegui also had other daughters who might have had children, so there may be other descendants out there. For now, my focus is on the above. 

In March, I received my own mtDNA haplogroup update, with some very cool ancient connections to the Indigenous people of Southern California. Since I started seriously diving into DNA about a year ago, one of my research goals on my maternal side has been to try to identify the mtDNA haplogroup for the women in the line descending backward from Maria Jesus Vasquez.

Photo at the top of the post shows a mural from Venice Beach of an Indigenous woman, with the words From Diné to the Tongva, Still Here. The Diné ("the People" in the language of the Navajo) and Tongva (the Indigenous people of the Los Angeles basin) are among the many Indigenous groups populating the Pacific Coast and Southwest.

Catherine's result was A2a5, not too far off my own A2d2a within the larger family of A2 people who came across the Beringia land bridge from Siberia into Alaska thousands of years ago. This means everyone in the descendancy chart above (but not necessarily all their descendants not shown) would have also carried the A2a5 mtDNA haplogroup, and further back a maternal ancestor of Reyes Valdes would have been an Indigenous woman.

FTDNA. A2a5 Discover Report.

About 2900 years ago, when A2a5 was formed, the Athabaskan speaking people this woman came from may have been in the Pacific Northwest or Alaska (we do not know for certain).

I'm grateful to know the haplogroup on this branch and now I'm even more curious to see if we can identify another mtDNA line on the Mexican side of the tree. While a lot of my research has identified professions for some of the men on these particular branches, mtDNA puts the focus on the maternal side. mtDNA discoveries are really cool and I encourage anyone to take a test and add to the growing MitoTree of Humankind.