The main goals of the project are:- a) to determine which families and places members originate from b) to prove which variants of the surnames are related to one another c) to help participants overcome genealogical brick walls d) to see which haplogroup (see below) each member belongs to e) to find out how widely families have spread in the world Haplogroups: Haplogroups indicate your deep ancestral origins dating back thousands of years. As humans have evolved their DNA has slowly mutated. Different mutations have occurred in different regions, which means that the migration path of our ancestors can be identified. Human Y chromosome DNA (Y-DNA) haplogroups are lettered A through R, and are further subdivided using numbers and lower case letters. Most ancient Britons belong to haplogroup R1b which is found across Western Europe. There are also a lot of people who have haplogroup I1a, who could be descendants of Danes or Saxons who settled along the east coast of the British Isles. Other haplogroups commonly found in Britons include R1a (from East Europe & Central Asia) and J1 and J2 (from the mediterranean & middle east). People with R1a and J1/2 haplogroups may have found their way to Britain first via the Romans and then, more recently, by immigrants. For more information please see Haplogroup and Main Haplogroups Pre-Surname Relatives Surnames were only adopted fairly recently in human history; very few families had surnames before 1200. By joining this project you will be able to compare your results with people in all FTDNA surname projects. If you find you match results with other surnames it is possible that you are related to them from before surnames were adopted, quite possibly thousands of years ago. To order your test kit please click on the following link:- JOIN