Autosomal DNA

October 2024:  England (Cornish) remains the second largest non-country nationality with 170 YDNA members, 61 mtDNA members.  We have 962 members, including 281 with BigY700 and 537 with Family Finder.

April 2023:  "Country" England (Cornish) with flag - paternal 118, maternal 49.  Keeping membership under 1000 - currently 921. Anyone more than quarter Cornish has over 20 matches. 243 BigY, 311 Y111,  373 mtDNA, 520 Family Finder. 

November 2019-Jan 2020: Change of membership criteria and re-introduction of membership request. Because nearly 300 members turned out to have no known connection to Cornwall, we have had to make having a Cornish ancestor  mandatory. This has necessitated the removal of about 250 members over about three months. Warning was given, then doubtful cases with few or suspect were requested to provide Cornish ancestors, to allow us to calculate '% Cornish". This has had the positive outcome that we have been able to compare "% Cornish" as defined from the family tree with number of within-project matches.

October 2018: FTDNA accidentally sent out an invitation letter to over 1000 testers, most of whom had no Cornish connection. About 350 of these joined the project. Unfortunately, a considerable number were from the "Early colonies" DNA pool in the USA (mostly Virginia and the Carolinas). Many of these match each other, giving false 'in-project' matches. When we have time, we will identify and remove these non-Cornish members. In-project matches are now far more likely to have a Cornish mutual ancestor.

July 2018 Project now majority autosomal. 660 members - 372 with Family Finder, 258 with mtDNA (mostly full sequence) 279 with Y67, 105 with Big Y (about 60 Cornish). LivingDNA sometimes inaccurate for people less than 1/4 Cornish.

March 2017: Project no longer requires an entry request. 150 members have taken Family Finder test out of 270. First results from LivingDNA are very accurate for people who are half Cornish. The Cornwall mtDNA project has been assimilated and heavily cleaned up to give about 80 new members. 

Jan 2017: Seeking input from members on close relatives, non-Cornish and on the different requirements of Y and autosomal.

Nov 2016: Complex diagram showing most members are connected through distant links to half a dozen 'core members' or families who are also heavily connected:
7 core members and about 24 moderately connected members.  Cornish crest added.     

May 2016  About half of members taking the FF test have a match within Cornwall, 14 of these form a network around three men who are fully or half-Cornish. First diagram produced.

Nov 2015: 103 members. Project opened to autosomal 'associate' members; generally not vetted as long as Cornish ancestry is stated. 'Full membership' still reserved for men with Y-DNA from Cornwall.

Y-DNA

March 2017. Due to changing focus of this project towards family matching away from Y-research, for consistency and administrative ease we have broken off the original Y-DNA project into a new Cornwall Advanced YDNA project with 101 members taken from this project. This maintains our curated database of Cornish Y-DNA. All members of the new project are also members of CORNWALL. Men from the CORNWALL project who have a paternal line of descent from Cornwall and have tested SNPs may join the new project.
https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/cornwalladvancedydna 

Dec 10 2016. 200 members including 166 full members 

April 2016: L21 paper written which suggests SW England was a major point of dispersal for classic British R1b-L21 Y-DNA to the Continent  https://rmit.academia.edu/JoeFlood/Drafts

Nov 2015: We have finally passed 100 members. Associate membership introduced under trial for autosomal members, following teh lead of DEVON.

Sep 2015. 18 members order new R1b Backbone Test.  These new SNP packs have enabled us to show something we have always suspected - that Cornwall is full of ancient rare DNA from the early Bronze period around 2500 BC when Stonehenge was being constructed. In particular we have large  amounts of R-DF27, usually regarded as Hispanic - probably demonstrating the presence of an early "Atlantic culture" with heavy trading interchange of metals and grains.

Nov 2014. After 3 years we have about 75 members,  following the book launch at the Cornish Association of Victoria 

Oct 2013: 50 members

July 2011: Project starts in collaboration with Debbie Kennett, administrator of DEVON, the first English single-county project 

mtDNA

In 2018 we took over the Cornwall-mtDNA project. Many members of that project were ineligible, and we reduced numbers from 130 to 70. Since then, legitimate membership has increased to 102 (Oct 2024) with 66 distinct mtDNA haplogroups.