The Spearin Surname Project is registered with the Guild of One-Name Studies. Further information about the project and the progress we have made so far can be found on our dedicated website and or Facebook page. 

We use the spelling Spearin but there are many variants including McSpeerin, Spearin, Spearing, Spearman, Speerin, Speering, Speiran, Speirin, Sperin, Spering, Sperrin, Sperring, Sperrings, Sperrink, Sperrins, Spierin, Spiering, Spierings, Spierink, Spirin, Spiring, Spirring

“We” are a group of researchers, located in New Jersey, Canada, Australia, Dublin, Limerick, Cork and elsewhere, who have been researching our own individual Spearin lines for many years (even going back to the 1970’s) but some of us came together in Jan 2011 to collaborate on this Y-DNA project in the hope that it will confirm what we have come to suspect – that all our various lines are related and that we can trace our joint heritage back to a family of London Goldsmiths in the late 1500’s.

Documentary evidence suggests that all Spearin’s who can be traced back to Ireland, originated in Limerick where they arrived from London about 1660-1680. They had close ties with the Hartwell family, who in turn were English soldiers. What the exact relationship was between these two families remains to be elucidated and is the subject of ongoing research.

The problem with the Irish records is that few go back beyond 1800 and most of us have hit a brick wall with our individual trees at this timepoint. This is where DNA testing of the Y chromosome comes to the rescue. This testing has the potential to establish the following:

• That all Spearin’s originating from Ireland are indeed related

• This in turn means that each line that matches the rest of the group can be relatively confident that their line originated from London in the late 1500’s

• Y-DNA testing may also help establish which families within our group are more closely related to each other, and this in turn will help focus research on establishing a more robust connection between the different lines (either through further DNA testing or via further research into paper records)

As of 2012, the goals of the group expanded to include the following:

1. to establish the most common genetic signatures among people named Spearin/Spearing/Sperring (or any of it's other many variants)

2. to establish which Spearin/Spearing variants are most closely related to each other (for example, are the Irish Spearin's in Genetic Family 1 related to the English Sperring's or the Dutch Spierink's?)

to help people named Spearin/Spearing establish to which genetic family they belong

4. to generate theories based on the DNA data relating to the deeper ancestral origins of each genetic family, both within a genealogical timeframe (i.e. after 1000 A.D.) and before it (i.e. route of migration out of Africa and into Europe, up to 1000 A.D.)

If you would like to join our group you are more than welcome. The more people that join and undergo Y-DNA testing, the more reliable the results become, and the more conclusions can be drawn from the data about how closely each of the individual family lines are related to each other.

For joining instructions, please click on "About This Group", and then "Goals". If you have already been tested by FTDNA, just go to "Join Request" above and then click on the orange Join button.