The Berkeley DNA Project welcomes participants with a known or assumed direct male DNA connection to the surname Berkeley, or any of its variants, within the last 800-900 years, this being the period of the name’s use as a surname.  If this is you, we would very much encourage you to join today.

The Y-DNA tests offered by Family Tree DNA (Y-37, Y-111, Big Y-700) will help to delineate your direct male line from you, to your father, to his father, and so on back in time for many generations. You must be male to take this test, and ideally you’ll have the surname Berkeley, or one of its variants: Berkley, Barkley, Bartley etc.  If you have a different surname but you believe there is a Berkeley or variant in your direct male line, whatever the circumstances, you are also welcome to participate.  If you are female, you will need to find a male participant to represent your tree.

We usually suggest new male participants start by ordering a 37 marker Y-DNA test, as this will establish whether a more refined test is warranted. You can upgrade from 37 markers later if required.  Although this approach costs slightly more initially than buying a higher level test (Y-111 or Big Y-700),  it will save money where no further testing is required.

We do accept new members with Family Finder test results, as those can be informative in the relatively short term and can be used in conjunction with Y-test results.  The Y test’s ability to deep mine your genealogy, however, is always preferred.

While Y-DNA results are ordinarily linked to a tester’s name through the secure website at Family Tree DNA, that identification can be anonymised if required.   Equally, testers are free to add as much personal or genealogical information to their results as they wish.  For our project to flourish, testers names are the minimum requirement and, in order to find DNA matches, participants should always choose to have their results made public in the database.   Adding  the name of your earliest known Berkeley/variant ancestor to your personal account,  ideally with a date and place of birth, will also enhance your chances of identifying matches.

Our project has been growing steadily for a few years now and along the way there have been discoveries that would not have been found in any other way. We have been running alongside pre-existing projects, such as the Barclay DNA Project and the Bartlett DNA Project, and in all cases, where incidences of surname evolution have been discovered, we have been ready to share those discoveries so that each project can benefit. Our aim is to maximize your discoveries and develop the new knowledge taken from members’ DNA test data.

By participating you will have an opportunity to uncover information not provided by the written record and this could help fundamentally with your family history research. As we acquire new members we can discover related family trees and use those to provide information about connections, while investigating the evolution and distribution of the surname.

The surnames in this DNA Project are also researched as part of the Berkeley one-name study. You can learn more about this significant research, and the associated family trees, by visiting the one-name study website, or contacting the Project Administrator, Nick Berkeley.

http://one-name.org/profiles/Berkeley.html

Order your test kit TODAY, at the bottom of this page, or visit the website above for more information.

If you do not wish to participate personally, but would like to support us, please consider donating to the general fund so that we can help those who are in need of funds for testing. To make a donation please click on the link above and specify "Berkeley" Project General Fund.