Years before Big Y testing was available, interest in more detailed Y-DNA testing grew among several members of the Martin Y-DNA Project who all matched Group 8 (Family A), even though many of the men were not named Martin.  Now that more than 20 of these men have upgraded to Big Y, several distinct branches have been clearly delineated on the block tree, with our multiple Williams and Clements members showing close relations under haplogroups R-FTA45618 and R-BY62178, respectively.  Grouping of the other non-Martin surnames is not yet clear, but with the exception of our two distant cousins in the Netherlands, they all appear to have branched off in some way from our common R-BY27212 ancestor, who might have been our elusive immigrant patriarch in colonial Virginia.  The Netherlands "branch" is showing an average of seven private variants for both men, with no shared variants yet found to define a haplogroup beyond the R-YP658 paragroup, whose common ancestor might have been born around 900 CE.

More information is available on our WikiTree Project Page.