One day while I was in college, a friend asked me a question that to this day has stuck with me. She asked me, “how far can you trace your maternal line?”. She very well knew I was into genealogy and that I could rattle off various names and generations but I still stopped to think, “Hmmm… counting my mom – six generations“. “And what about your paternal line?” she then asked. “Umm… actually six as well” I responded.
She was intrigued and so was I by this question and its potential answer. It turns out that she had just come back from a sociology/anthropology class where they were talking about men/women, and how (patrilineal) societies tend to lean more to remembering male ancestors versus female ancestors. She said that most of her classmates could not remember as many of their female ancestors in comparison to their male ancestors such as grandfather and great-grandfathers. Only one other student in class, a Hispanic student, remembered fairly well enough names in his direct maternal line. I told her I was not too shocked, and that our culture as Hispanics could potentially be helpful for this. Mainly because in a lot of the Hispanic world, women keep their maiden names and so their identities are not erased when they marry, coupled with the fact that most people have two surnames which they carry for the entirety of their lives.
Now in the 21st century, we can remember our ancestresses not only by their names but also through the matrilineal mtDNA lines we inherit from them as well. All humans inherit a maternal haplogroup from their mothers which is unlike a paternal haplogroup that can only be inherited by men from their fathers. This means that when you test, you can receive a maternal haplogroup from companies such as 23andme or FtDNA (if you take the maternal haplogroup test). My haplogroup comes from my mother and is an indigenous group – which I inherited from my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, etc. Interestingly enough, my 2nd great-grandmother was the only daughter of the family which means that it is thanks to her descendants like my grandmother and mother that we know our line was C1b4. Haplogroups represent a tiny sliver of who you are because they show only a specific branch’s origin (not to be confused with autosomal DNA which is a combination of various ancestors and generations in your past).