Hello all, my name is Brett Ward and I reside in Sydney, Australia. Mac a Bhaird (being Ward pre anglicised) as many of you will appreciate is an Irish occupational name (Bard, historian) and very old and reasonably prolific throughout Ireland. I can trace my family to about 1800 in Abington, County Limerick but the surname has its highest frequency in traditional ancestral locations within Galway and Tyrone. Ward is also a separate and unrelated English surname, but clearly causes much confusion. I have been watching DNA developments on this mailing list tentatively ever since having 37 STR markers mapped. This led me to test with Britains DNA (Ethnoancestry) a few years ago to ascertain that I was M222+. This then led me to look into Irish Ward DNA results and I would suggest that around 40-50% of Wards that I have seen are M222+. This may be little more than random for descendants from those West and North Western areas within Ireland. I have also recently just received my Chromo2 results from Britains DNA and am awaiting the raw file to be uploaded. They have a genetic signature page though that shows my 300 plus ‘positives’. Within Britains DNA tree, the lowest level I have achieved is S660, but I have aspirations! I have had a look at some trees, such as that to be found on the Kennedy website but do not seem to be able to find a lower level. As the song goes, where do I begin? Is there a useful guide somewhere for me to come up to speed quickly or some websites that I should hit first? I am very interested in pushing things along from a Ward angle. Thank you for reading and look forward to being a bit more active than the last few years, but that won’t be difficult. Brett