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...Since genetic testing is a market driven economy, do not expect that all geographies are covered equally. By far the best coverage are Irish and Scottish testers. Why ? They fit into the science much better: 1) clan names tend to have the primary clan septs with very large living offspring today (unlike the English Brooks surname that proves that living by a brook (stream) just does not mean much for relatedness)...
Many English surnames are not much different to the way Irish or Scots surnames evolved, in the sense that many of them also have regional clusters and relatedness, as in a type of 'clan'. To take some from my own tree as an example
Hoyle - West Riding of Yorkshire/ parts of East Lancashire
Bruerton - Parts of Staffordshire/Warwickshire
Metcalf - North Yorkshire and the North East
Holland - Parts of Lancashire
Tuston - Hampshire
Irish ancestors are specially blessed by for genetic testing since Americans have literally ten times the Irish blood flowing in our veins than the entire Republic of Ireland. Canadians and Australian/NZ each have as much Irish blood flowing through their veins as the Republic of Ireland. If you have an English line that may not have immigrated to America, you will struggle much more in finding cousins...
'blood flowing through their veins...' The Irish diaspora, like any ancient or early industrial diaspora, is more complicated than that and more Irish moved to the UK than to America. Also just as many English migrated to the colonies/USA as did the Irish
Irish, Scots, Welsh and English have been migrating, circulating around the British Isles and intermarrying for thousands of years and basically share the same ethnicity/'blood' and are of very similar cultures. There may well still be clusters of deeply related people from old 'clans' or 'tribes' in cut off rural places like Connacht, the Shetland Islands, Anglesey and Norfolk but this is only a small proportion of each countries overall population.
England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales were not divided by impenetrable walls that prevented the movement of people. Industrialisation, beginning as early as the 17th century, and the British armed forces, meant people from each corner of Britain/Ireland migrated and mingled quite freely.
An example of how far back this goes is an in-law in my own tree.
My gt gt aunt married a man in the North of England with a very distinct 'Irish' name. At first I assumed his family had migrated to work in industry in the 19th century and that they might also have migrated due to the famine (many Irish from famine hit areas migrated to the North of England/Scotland) but on researching his tree, I found that his direct male line had been in this part of England for hundreds of years and that they had intermarried with local English families. His name is Irish but the vast majority of his tree is English. The reverse will be true of an English man who might have migrated to Ireland in say the 1500 or 1600's or even earlier . The history of the people of this little corner of Europe is complex because the people, ancient and modern, moved around and intermarried so often and over thousands of years.
