This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Author: MichaelWright12 Surnames: Classification: queries Message Board URL: http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.wright/2263.2990.1.1.1/mb.ashx Message Board Post: David, Let me answer you by the numbers. 1. Yes. 2. Access UK Family History Center records for Liverpool and the surrounding county. You will want to focus on ship records first and then start branching out to parish records looking first for birth, marriage and death records. It is possible they left because their parents had died and left them ship passage money. You might also access the Public Records Office in Kew (listed as UK National Archives on the Internet)and do name searches to find any records that might mention you ancestors within the pre-1808 period. Consider joining Ancestry.com.uk. UK census records will do you no good as they do not start until 1841, but you might find family members in Liverpool or the surrounding counties using same given name combinations or look for similar occupation information from guild records appropriate to what the men did as a trade or other records that Ancestry has on line for the early period of UK history. 3. I recommend only Family Tree DNA (www.familytreedna.com). for testing and joining a surname project. They are the oldest and the best in the genetic genealogy field. The y-DNA program is fairly mature at this point and can be extremely helpful for the rarer haploids, which are everyghing except R1a and R1b haploids. For those who are of Haploid R1 the going is much more strenuous. To make much use of the STR profile from R1 Y-DNA you almost always need to pay for a full 67 markers in order to be sure of family grouping within any surname. Beyond its genealogical uses, Y-DNA is a great anthropological tool for discovering where your family group originated prior to 1000 C. E. The new Family Finder DNA test is less directly helpful at this time largely because not enough people in the various surname projects have had the test performed, so you have a limited number of other possible people to match profiles with. That will change over time, but for now it would ! probably give you only an overview of your own ethnic 'composition' without significantly advancing you kinship with others in the database. Hope that helps some. Mike Important Note: The author of this message may not be subscribed to this list. If you would like to reply to them, please click on the Message Board URL link above and respond on the board.