I received my test results back for my mitochondrial DNA - the DNA passed down the maternal line.  Unfortunately, I was under the wrong impression this test would give me a few answers to questions I had concerning James Pennington's lineage.  That it can not do.  My results placed me in a Haplogroup based on my mother's DNA which she passed on to me - from her mother (Berma Mae Bennett) and her mother (Eva Watson) and her mother (Stella Wheeler) and her mother (Sarah Miller) and so forth. 

I need a male member of the Pennington family to step up and take a Y-DNA67 test.  This is a male specific test. Results identify the ethnic and geographic origin of the paternal line. It includes a balanced panel of sixty-seven Y-chromosome Short Tandem Repeat, STR, markers. The additional markers refine the predicted time period in which two individuals are related and eliminate unrelated matches. A perfect match at sixty-seven markers indicates a common ancestor in very recent times. This is the ideal test for matching if a break in the paper trail, such as an adoption, is known or suspected. A haplogroup is determined and backed by our SNP Assurance Program.

Test can be purchased here.

What will this prove?  The test will give us definitive results as to our heritage in Scotland/England.  There may be matches in the growing database of others who have taken the test.  Are we actually Penningtons or was this name adopted by James?  Do we have any living ancestors in Scotland?  England? 

It appears that there are several different families that adopted the surname Pennington (or spelling variant) at different times. There is even an aristocratic line of Penningtons who held the title Baron Muncaster and lived in the same castle in Cumberland, England for 800 years. The last mentioned family’s male line DNA signature remains elusive, but all of those families that have held the surname for centuries probably are ultimately linked to one of two villages in Lancashire. One is to be found near where the Muncaster family started to use the surname in about 1190 AD, and the other is Pennington near Leigh, Lancashire (which is near Manchester) and this was named after a Richard de Pe(i)nnington living about 1220. Those who adopted the name later in the 14th C probably did so since it identified where they were from e.g. ‘John of Pennington’. Our study appears to be sorting Penningtons/Pinningtons into one of a handful of “genetic families”. We have at least 34 extensive family trees waiting to link up with the DNA evidence, and a DNA match can often identify which family a Pennington descends from. We are very interested in recruiting all Penningtons but what is most helpful to our effort is English or British Commonwealth Penningtons with a good knowledge of their ancestry, since those Penningtons that immigrated to the US may be only a subset of the Pennington families that remained in the UK.