This project had its genesis in the discoverythat the founding administrator’s Y-DNA matched participants in the HabsburgProject, a Y-DNA project that encompasses a group of people with matching DNAbut apparently unrelated surnames. Several participants in the HabsburgProject, with surnames that include Hoppes, Messmore, and Slaughter, are ableto trace their roots back to ancestors who originated in Switzerland. (Thereare also separate Messmore and Slaughter surname projects.) With a combinationof DNA analysis, documentary evidence, and historical research, theadministrators of the Habsburg project have determined that several of thesesurnames have their origins in the vicinity of the Swiss Canton of AppenzellAusserhoden in the 1500s. Another surname in this group is Kreis. Although theyhave not elected to participate in the Habsburg project, two more matchingprofiles in the FTDNA databank belong to living Swiss men named Kreis. Theadministrators of the Habsburg Project calculate a likely most recent commonancestor (MRCA) for everyone in their project in the 9th century. Refer to theHabsburg Project for more information on this aspect of their study.

The conclusions of the Habsburg Project, as wellas the Slaughter and Messmore Projects, provide helpful information for Krisefamily historians about the European origins of one family named Krise. Thenext step is to determine where other families with the Krise surname, andvariants, fit into this picture—if they do at all. The Krise surname projectwas initiated in October 2011 to address this question.

The administrator’s Kriss line can be reliablytraced back to a man named Georg Greiß who was born about 1759. “Greiß” or “Greiss”is the generally accepted original spelling of his name, but documentary evidencefor him and his children  reflects the fact that spelling was fluid in the18th and early 19th centuries, particularly since many people were unable toread and write and the spelling of their name depended on the way someone elseheard it. Georg had at least one brother and it is believed, but not known forcertain, that they were born in America and were sons of the immigrant StephenGreiss. Based on the experience of their genetic cousins, the Slaughters andthe Messmores, together with the fact that there are genetic cousins namedKreis in Switzerland today, it is likely that the family originated inSwitzerland. However, there is evidence that the family sojourned in Germany,perhaps for a generation or two, before emigrating to America. The Swissorigin theory for this family has been given new support as a result of theaddition of another member to the project (May 2012). In 1911, George Kreis,who was born in Neukirch, in the Canton of Thurgau, Switzerland, immigrated toAmerica. DNA from one of his descendants closely matches DNA of the descendantsof Georg Greiß.

The Greiß family settled in the vicinity ofFrederick County, Maryland, and York County, Pennsylvania, later moving west toCambria County, Pennsylvania. There were other people in Pennsylvania at thattime with the same or similar surnames. One of those families was the family ofAndreas Grass, who was born about 1728 and immigrated (possibly with his fatherand other family members) to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Grass and Greißare variants of the same name and, while there is no documentary connection orother evidence of a relationship between Georg Greiß and Andreas Grass, theywere certainly genetic cousins. A descendant of Andreas is also a participantin the Habsburg Project and a close match to the Greiß line.

Another immigrant to the same area was JohannHeinrich Kreiss, whose descendants now generally spell their surname as Krise.Johann’s family was also in Frederick County, Maryland, and in nearby AdamsCounty, Pennsylvania. A number of his descendants had farms which were part ofthe Gettysburg battlefield in the Civil War. However, this was the first Krisefamily we identified which is not related to the Greiß/Grass genetic family. Infact, the “Gettysburg Krises” are members of an entirely different haplogroupthat moved westward along the northern Mediterranean coastline 25,000 years agowhen the ancestors of the Habsburg group were in central Asia. Haplogroup E, ofwhich this family is a member, includes several different ethnic groups whosehistory may provide clues to the origin of this Krise family.

A third Krise family in Pennsylvania descendsfrom Martin Kreis who is believed to have been born about 1720 in England,though some researchers cite family traditions which claim he was Dutch and wasnot a Kreis at all, but was adopted. In any case, the DNA of one of hisAmerican descendants indicates that Martin was a member of a third geneticfamily named Krise. There are other persons with the surname Krise who settledin the Frederick County, Maryland, area but who have not been linked, by DNA ordocumentary evidence, with any of the families so far described. We are alsocurrently seeking participants from a Kraiss/Krise family in northwesternPennsylvania, quite possibly establishing a fourth different Krise family inone American state.

A fourth family named Krise in America descendsfrom John [Johann] Ulrich Kreis who immigrated to America in 1866 and settledin Illinois. Census records report that he was born in Switzerland but,surprisingly, his descendant's DNA does not match the DNA of other SwissKreis's in the databank at this time. It would appear that there is more thanone Kreis family with roots in Switzerland. Initial results indicate that JohnUlrich Kreis shared the genetic signature of what is known as the Western AtlanticModal Haplotype (WAMH), the largest and most common genetic family in Europe.By contrast, our fifth Krise genetic family, the descendants of James WalkerGrice, who was born in Great Britain in 1871, belongs to Haplogroup T. Thepresence of this haplogroup in Europe is spotty, but it is also found along theMediterranean, in the Middle East, northern Africa, and even in Asia andAustralia. Haplogroup T is found in significant numbers in some Jewishpopulations. In fact, there is a Grice family tradition that they have Jewishancestry.

The increasing diversity which is evident amongthe various families named Krise raises the question of the origin of thefamily name. "Krise" is the most common modern American spelling, butthis spelling traces only to the early- to mid-1800s. Two older spellings, withGerman roots, are "Kreis[s]" and "Greis[s]". Where anyreliable written records exist, one or the other of these two variants (withone or two s's) is the spelling most often used by the original immigrant toAmerica. "Kreis" and "Greis" are also the spellings mostcommonly found today in Europe. In German, "kreis" means a circle ora district and "greis" means a grey head or old man. Discovering howand why these words came to be used as surnames is one of the secondary goalsof this project.

As the databank grows, it will be useful tofamily researchers as a tool for 1) identifying their deeper family roots and,possibly, immigration history, 2) confirming, clarifying, or disprovingspecific family relationships, and 3) collaborating with other familyresearchers on a variety of research issues to which DNA research can beapplied.

Results page updated on 26 January 2017