The Holly/Holley project was initially motivated by interest in the descendants of John Holly, 1618-1681, born in England and one of the original founders of Stamford, Fairfield County, Connecticut, USA. For more information about the Stamford Holly's go to John Holly Family. This project was started Jan. 2006.  

It was originally a Y-DNA project, and that is still the primary focus.  ONLY ydna test results will be displayed.  Only Holly/Holley surname ydna testers (and close ydna matches) will be grouped according to dna matching.  We encourage all ydna testers to do as much advanced testing as possible.  Even advanced SNP testing is proving to be a valuable tool for genealogy.  BigY testing is a ydna discovery test and will eventually be able to sort out family relationships into timeframes supported by traditional genealogy and documentation.

Over time some Holly descendants with autosomal and mtDNA tests have also joined.  This opens the project up to the ladies as well.  Project members who have autosomal testing results at FTDNA can use the "Advanced Match" function of Family Finder to determine matches within our project.

We have seen some crossover into the Hawley surname project, and any members of that project are welcome to also belong to this project. 

We encourage all members to also join projects related to their haplogroups and their geographic origins.  If you need help with this, please contact one of our admins for assistance.