Interest in Gloucs Regional DNA Project

[supermoussi]

Has anyone with a Gloucestershire maternal or paternal line an interest in their pre-surname ancestors? DNA testing is now getting to the stage where we are beginning to find out some interesting things about our past but, as far as I know, there isn't any regional study of the genetic makeup of the Gloucs area, so here are a few questions for you:-

• Would anyone else have an interest in this?
• What sort of things would you be interested in finding out?
• What would be the best way to make people aware of the project?

Thanks 

[Richard Hulan]

I have expressed an interest in this a few times on a Forest of Dean list, but that ball has yet to start rolling.  We do have one man from the FoD Hulin family in a US-based project, tested to 37 markers.  But he seems to match people named Scott, and does not match any of us, so far.  We still are inclined to think that's the origin of the American bearers of our surname, as of their immigration to Virginia in the mid-17th century.  The gentleman who started that discussion in 2009, who was from Australia, passed away last year.

http://www.forest-of-dean.net/fodmembers/index.php?id=18139

There is a current discussion about US/UK collaboration on DNA projects underway on a RootsWeb list, stimulated I believe by the recent WDYTYA conference in London.  I'll also post a link to that -- it seems relevant to me, although not specific to Gloucestershire.

http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/GENEALOGY-DNA/2013-03/1362251004

[supermoussi]

Hi Richard,

It's good to see that its been discussed by the Forest of Dean people. It's pretty easy to set up a project from an admin point of view, but the problem is making people aware of it. I do not live in Gloucs so would have limited ability to recruit people. Really it needs someone actually in the area itself, perhaps in one of the Family History Societys, who meets Gloucs people on a day to day basis.

The blue blobs on the map ( http://sse.royalsociety.org/2012/exhibits/genetic-maps/ ) are definitely interesting.  Did you ever find out any thing more specific?

[DevonCruwys]

I run the Devon DNA Project: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/devon However, I don't live in Devon and only a small percentage of my project members actually live in Devon. Although well over half the project members live in the British Isles I have people in the project from many other countries. There are many people from Australia and Canada, some from the USA, and even members living in Japan and Argentina. I found when I started the project that there already were many people with Devon ancestry in the FTDNA database. I recruited them from Ysearch though that site is currently down for maintenance. I wrote articles about the project for the Devon Family History Society and various other journals. The key part is identifying the surnames associated with the county. You can add them to the project profile listings so that anyone searching for those surnames will find your project:

http://www.familytreedna.com/project-join-request.aspx?group=Devon

I've got a few people in the project whose surname does not yet have its own project.

[supermoussi]

The key part is identifying the surnames associated with the county. You can add them to the project profile listings so that anyone searching for those surnames will find your project:

Devon and Cornwall are lucky in that respect as they have quite a few names that are only found in that part of the country. as far as I know Gloucs has much more common names with quite a big dollop of patrynomic names, which possibly wandered over from Wales. Apart from its place names (Barrington, Slaughter, Gloucester, etc), has Gloucs got any distinctive surnames? Has anyone ever done a study of Gloucs surnames?

[DevonCruwys]

To identify Gloucestershire surnames you need to get a copy of Steve Archer's Surname Atlas CD:

http://www.archersoftware.co.uk/satlas01.htm

As well as providing wonderful maps it also allows you to produce a list of surnames ranked by frequency in each county so that you can hone in on the names that are "peculiar" to Gloucestershire.

Another option is to extract the Gloucestershire names from Guppy's Homes of Family Names:

http://archive.org/details/homesoffamilynam00gupprich

It was written a long time ago but still gives a reasonable idea of the surnames specific to Gloucestershire.

For the Devon project I also went through all the surname interest listings in the DFHS journal. Alternatively you could trawl through the archives of the Gloucestershire Rootsweb mailing list or the Rootschat archives for Gloucestershire to see which names people are researching.

[Richard Hulan]

The blue blobs on the map ( http://sse.royalsociety.org/2012/exhibits/genetic-maps/ ) are definitely interesting.  Did you ever find out any thing more specific?

There is a much more detailed version of the map, displayed at that Royal Society summer science fair last July but not yet published.  Brian Swann took a closeup snapshot that included Gloucs and Wales, and I believe the previous poster DevonCruwys blogged about it last summer at some length.  The blobs themselves represent (blood-) sampled individuals, all four of whose grandparents were born within 50 kilometers of the sampled person's birthplace.  That POBI project looks first at Ancestry Informative Markers for an autosomal overview of the population.  It is possible still to test the stored samples (of the male subjects) for Y-DNA, and everybody for mtDNA, but that was not the mandate of the initial phase of the project and it remains to be seen whether it will be undertaken.

[Deleted the map detail link, since that group is supposed to be "private," and with the link I posted it's really not.  See below, two messages, re: ISOGG group at Facebook.]

[supermoussi]

The aim of the POBI project was medical, not genealogical, so they probably won't ever test the Y-DNA/mtDNA of the volunteers.

[DevonCruwys]

You can see my blog post on the People of the British Isles Project here:

http://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/people-of-british-isles-project.html

I attended Bruce Winney's talk on POBI at WDYTYA and the write-up is included in this report:

http://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/who-do-you-think-you-are-live-2013-days.html

The Nature paper was originally due to be submitted last autumn but they are way behind schedule and seem to be doing extra analysis so it's going to be a few more months before it gets submitted. The last I heard about the Y-chromosome analysis was that they were going to meet Mark Jobling at Leicester University last autumn. I suspect Richard III got in the way and nothing much has happened. The Y-DNA will be Y-SNPs rather than the Y-STRs so we will only get haplogroup distributions though that in itself should still be interesting.

Brian Swann did post some photos from the Royal Society exhibition but they are all in the private ISOGG group on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/11416337921/

ISOGG membership is free. You just need to supply an e-mail address:

http://www.isogg.org/wiki/ISOGG_Wiki:Joining_ISOGG