At present, we are still "exploring the territory." Until recently, all of the samples tested belonged to the same general group (known as HAPLOGROUP R1b, the most common such group in western Europe). Even now, there are only a few exceptions, and most of these are from haplogroup I1a, the second most common in that area. However, we also have one from haplogroup E3a, which is more common in Africa.

Within the project, we can distinguish four subgroups or patterns confirmed by multiple samples and corresponding to known 17th-century ancestry, but there are also a considerable number of samples with no close matches. For the time being, the unmatched "R1b" samples are displayed along with Pattern 1, since that is the largest group, and the non-matching, non-R1b samples are placed as "Other." Within each of the first two subgroups, there is an evident "majority" pattern, and markers that differ from the majority are colored gray in the table. Note that DYS389ii is tabulated as reported by the testing lab, but that length actually includes two pieces, one of which is already reported as DYS389i. We therefore use the differences between "ii" and "i" for the purpose of comparison in the column marked "389ii". Another complexity comes into play with DYS464, which appears four times in the genome. Since we cannot tell the four instances apart, they are conventionally reported in order of increasing size. In principle, when comparing two haplotypes, one could check off any matching instances within DYS464 as true matches, even if they appear in different columns, but that practice leads to a trade-off between the number of matching markers and the sizes of the mismatches. Note that this same ambiguity also appears with DYS385, DYS459, and other multi-copy markers, but to a lesser extent.

When comparing haplotypes, there are two very different possible contexts. In the general context, when the two persons are not known to be related, and they may have nothing in common besides their surname, the only relevant information may simply be the two haplotypes. The degree of the relationship, if any, is the count of generations from person "A" back to the most recent common ancestor and from there down to person "B". When the two persons are in the same generation, their degree of relationship is just twice the time (measured in generations) from their common ancestor. This time is generally abbreviated as TMRCA. How do we get from the haplotypes to the relationship or TMRCA? It is important to remember that we can never deduce the relationship exactly from just the DNA testing. However, there is a fairly simple procedure for getting a approximate answer. By counting up all of the differences, we get what is called the "genetic distance" and we can estimate the TMRCA, given the number of markers compared and the average rate of mutation for those markers.