Gail, The following is a quote from "Imperial Hubris", "When entering on duty as an intelligence officer two decades and more ago, one of my first supervisors often said the key to framing and solving intelligence problems was to first 'do the checkables.' The checkables were those parts of the problem that were knowable, the things on which there were classified archival records, pertinent and available human experience, current human assets to consult, or or even the results of media and academic research. ... This supervisor's recipe was to exploit to exhaustion the 'checkables' to learn the problem's history and context, determine precisely what we already knew, establish the range of things we knew little or nothing about, and thereby, identify the information we to acquire before acting to resolve the problem." "Imperial hubris : why the West is losing the war on terror / Anonymous. page 21. I think that this recipe applies to genealogy as well, in fact to any line of scholarly research. We "do the checkables" that is, the easy stuff before expending time and money finding information that is not readily available. Each researcher must identify and prioritize the "checkables" according to his or her individual family. If you have a well documented family history already available, you may not need DNA testing. On the other hand, if the family history is "spotty" and you are researching a common surname, such as Turner, DNA testing becomes more important. Phil Turner "Gail R. Blancett" <[email protected]> wrote: Megan Smolenyak, co-author with Ann Turner, of the book "Trace Your Roots with DNA" has been conducting a survey on her website on when is an appropriate time to participate in a DNA project. Should you exhaust every means of regular research first and then as a last resort do DNA testing or should you participate in a DNA project early on in your research? As someone who has spent almost every waking hour of the last 20 years doing genealogy research--going to libraries, archives, spending weeks in the Salt Lake City genealogy library poring over microfilm, traveling to courthouses half-way across the country, traipsing through cemeteries, etc.--I wouldn't want to have missed a minute of that fun. However, in the process, I have collected reams of paper, notebook upon notebook of scratchy notes, with much of it being on people that have no connection to my Turners. I always felt, well it just might connect later on so I better write it down just in case. While all my records and knowledge of Turners allows me to help many people, everyone doesn't have the time to spend on it or the total addiction to this search as I do and they want to find their line and move on. In the early days of DNA testing, the guidance was that you should work until you have exhausted all regular sources and hit a brick wall. More and more however, as the value of the testing is becoming widely seen, the thinking is shifting to the view that says, "Do the easy stuff first (such as locating your direct line in all census), then check to see if a DNA test could guide your research, before you spend lots of money on death certificates or lots of hours scrolling through microfilm records." Those of us who did it "the old fashioned way" have a tendency to feel the newbies should have to work as hard as we did. Maybe not. One quote from the results of 1,237 people who have participated in Megan's survey: "Nine of the thirty-three respondents who have been doing genelaogy for less than a year have already taken a test or otherwise participated. This is an admittedly small sample, but it seems to suppport my belief that in the future, taking a DNA test will be the first step for many genealogical "newbies." I know of one Turner who suspects his line is to one of two different ones in a county in Upstate, SC. I have encouraged him to do the test because I know that both of these lines have already been tested in the project. His answer has been that he wants to search records for two more years, then he will consider the DNA test. Believe me, I've been through those records in that county and I do not believe he is going to find the proof by regular research. If he did the DNA test, he would know immediately if he matched either of those two other lines. I don't know about him, but I'd be willing to wager that two year's of his time is worth a whole lot more than the cost of the Y-DNA25 marker test! In addition, you can't make an overnight trip to any courthouse or archive now for the cost of a test. So, if you are dragging your feet on participating in the DNA project, I'd encourage you to give it a second thought. Group administrators don't push tests because we get anything monetarily from our participation. We believe that the tests will prove helpful to your genealogy quest. Even negative results are postive because you can rule out a lot of lines to which you can not be related. We definitely encourage participants to do the Y-DNA25 or Y-DNA37 marker test for best results. The Turner DNA Project's website has a join link at: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~turnerdna/ Gail R. Blancett Administrator Turner DNA Project, FTDNA ==== TURNER Mailing List ==== Turner list website - http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/surname/t/turner.html ============================== Search Family and Local Histories for stories about your family and the areas they lived. Over 85 million names added in the last 12 months. Learn more: http://www.ancestry.com/s13966/rd.ashx __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com