About us
(This section was most recently updated in December, 2008:)
We have now have seven participants in the project who have received DNA results, with two more participants' results pending. Currently, these seven people represent six different family lineages:
Members with heritage from Germany:
Project member #58347, with reported German heritage, has been assigned to haplogroup I1a, a group with traditionally German and Nordic ancestry. He seems to be a good representative sample of what the German/Lutheran lines of SCHREIER families look like.
Project member #N53344 also has German heritage, also spells his name SCHREIER, and is also in haplogroup I1a! However, he does not match the other German member that closely, so their common ancestor was likely before the advent of surnames.
Members with heritage from Hungary:
Project member #71140 spells his last name SCHREYER. His paternal ancestry originates in the city of Pest (now Budapest), Hungary circa 1820, and the family later moved to Poland. He tested 25 markers, and the results were very surprising. He has been assigned to haplogroup N, a somewhat rare group that has left descendants from Japan and Siberia in the east, across the steppes to Finland, and then spread out among the ancient Finn-Ugric speakers, and into Poland and Slovakia. This group includes the ancient Magyars, who came into Hungary over 1000 years ago, which may be how his paternal ancestral line got all the way from Siberia to Budapest. There are also two unofficial modal subgroups within haplogroup N: those with Finnish ancestry and those with more southern European ancestry. This project member belongs to the latter group, naturally, and has closer matches to Poles and Russians than to Finns or Siberians.
Members with heritage from Russia:
Project member #136319 is descended from a man who spelled his name SHRAYER, based on the Cyrillic transliteration of his name, and who was born in Izhevsk, Russia (USSR) in 1937. His ancestral origins probably were from much further west than that, as the town was basically created in the 20th Century, and his few close genetic matches tend to be from Germany and the Netherlands. He is in haplogroup R1b1b2, and a Deep-SNP haplogroup test is currently pending to better place him in the Haplogroup R tree.
Members with heritage from Ukraine:
Project member #43043, with paternal origins in southwestern Ukraine from circa 1787, spells his name SCHREIER and has had 67 markers tested. A Deep-SNP test confirmed him to be in haplogroup G2c (formerly known as haplogroup G5). He and almost all of his close G2c matches are Ashkenazic Jews from the former "Pale of Settlement" area in Eastern Europe. It has recently been hypothesized that the G2c cluster represents pre-Inquisition Sicilian Jews who migrated into Eastern Europe within the past 400 to 500 years.
Project member #63694 has the last name SQUIRES, not Schreier. However, he reports that his family name was changed upon immigration to the United States from something that sounded somewhat like Schreier, and that Schreier is probably the closest match available as a DNA project at the moment. He was originally placed in the German heritage sub-group of this project, but we recently learned that his more distant ancestry was in fact from Russia or Ukraine, and later moved to Germany. He is Ashkenazic Jewish and is in haplogroup G2c, as is project member #43043 (see above), and upgrading his markers revealed that the two are a 34/37 match! This represents the first real match for SCHREIER group participants!
Members with heritage from the USA (original country of origin unknown):
Project member #N21890 descends from a man named Daniel SCHROYER who was born in the state of Maryland (town unknown) in March, 1781, and who later moved to Lawrence County, Illinois with his wife Rachel. His ancestors' names and their country of origin are unknown at this time. Given the spelling of this variant of the surname and his close genetic matches to other testees with ancestry from the British Isles, it is possible that this branch originally had British origins.