Hello, folks. I have been reading with some humor and some dismay all the posts regarding the usefulness (or the lack thereof) of commercial DNA testing for genealogical purposes. It almost sounds to me like there are some holdovers from the OJ Simpson trial jury who are subscribed here <vbg> I'll start with this: My name is Greg Lovelace, and I've been researching the Lovelace and Loveless families, primarily in the southeast US, for about 13 years now. I consider myself a genealogist at least at the advanced intermediate level. I know I'm no expert, otherwise I'd be able to somehow make a living out of genealogy, and I haven't figured that out yet! After discovering online genealogy years ago and meeting many other researchers through the internet, I decided to form and administer the Lovelace List, first on the old Indiana U servers, and later at Rootsweb. The list has been in operation since 1996. There are several excellent genealogical researchers on the list as well as many who just like genealogy as a hobby. Those of us researching Lovelaces and Lovelesses in the southeast US come from several families, all of which we believed were related somehow. But, as with many families having roots in colonial times, we were unable to find paper records which would support our belief. Most of us were facing brick walls in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The subject of DNA testing arose on the list a couple years ago, and then resurfaced late last year. After much reading and consultation with the folks at FamilyTreeDNA, we devised a sampling plan to try and answer some of the questions we had concerning our various families. To date our project has tested 21 participants, and we have discovered some interesting things, confirmed some of the things we believed, and refuted others. Our results page is located here: http://www.satmel.com/dna/index.html So far we have been able to group our family into two distinct groups, one tracing back to Halifax Co., VA and the other to Montgomery Co., MD. The earliest dates we have for the Halifax line lie in the 1690s. The Montgomery Co. line goes back to the early 1700s. You might be asking how we know these things... Well, we're lucky in that most of us match exactly (25 markers out of 25) with one of the two groups. The VA group has 5 participants who are exact matches on the 25 markers, and the MD group has 9. In addition, there are 4 different groups containing a total of 5 subjects who match at 24/25 markers with the MD group, and one person who matches on 23/25 with the MD group. These are lines which branched off the main MD line which had a mutation at one or two of the markers. This whole thing is a lot easier to see... Go to the second page of the website: http://www.satmel.com/dna/results.html Something we did not see, and that Bennett Greenspan of FTDNA pointed out to us, is that the subject whose DNA differs from the MD group at 2 markers only differs from one of the other MD subgroups at 1 marker. This implies that one of the MD subroups was the line of origin of that 2-marker difference. We have also found out that one of the subjects, who we suspected to tie into the MD group through the group who ended up in Rutherford Co., NC is actually not a genetic relative at all! This is one of the "non-paternity" events that we find often happened with our ancestors. Right now we don't know the nature of the event, but it is evident from the test that, while this man carries the name Lovelace, he is either not a Lovelace genetically or he is a representative of an as-yet-undiscovered branch. Let me also say that we have excellent paper records documenting our genealogy back to the earliest ancestors we have listed on the results page. The third and final page of our DNA website outlines our various proven lineages back to many of those ealriest ancestors: http://www.satmel.com/dna/more_details.html There is still work to do, and we knew that before entering into the DNA study. We were told going in that legwork and old-fashioned genealogy detective work would still be necessary to establish the links. What we know now is that there are two unrelated groups of Lovelaces/Lovelesses, and that one of the groups has several offshoots. This is proven by the DNA matches. Now we of the MD group can concentrate our traditional research on those lines, ignoring for the moment the VA lines (and vice versa). Then when the time comes to leap back across the ocean to pre-colonial times (if that time ever comes!), we can start looking in jolly old England. Now there are a couple problems we have encountered in our study. First, the cost is nothing to sneeze at. We've used the 25-marker yDNA test. The group rate for that test is $169 for each test subject. Those of us who can afford to do so have paid for our own tests and, in some cases, have been reimbursed in part from others on our lines who were interested in having the tests done. There are still many folks who would like to be test subjects, but who cannot pony up the cash to do so. We're just beginning to take up collections for those folks, and hopefully we will have Lovelaces and Lovelesses from New England, Canada, and Australia participating soon. The other problem, and this is more pressing, lies in finding male Lovelaces or Lovelesses willing to be tested. In many of the lines we'd like to investigate, the list subscribers (and hence the interested genealogists we have access to) are removed in time from the Lovelace/Loveless name and have no known male cousins who carry the surnames. We're beating the bushes in these families, trying hard to discover test subjects. Hopefully, again, we will have more in the coming months and years as our researchers hit the streets, the internet, and the phone books looking for cousins. Now I'm not sure that any of this will satisfy any of the skeptics who have been questioning the genealogical value of DNA testing. All I can say is that we as a family are satisfied with our results. We have learned a lot as a consequence of this study, and we hope to add more subjects and learn even more. Thanks for you time and for listening. Be sure to visit the links above. Seeing the results is much better than me telling you about them. Peace, Part of the Tree, Greg Lovelace Greg Lovelace <gregl@starfishnet.com>