British Isles DNA by County

Member Guidelines

Once you receive your test results, you can start learning about your genetic heritage and search for near and distant cousins. Here is a checklist of steps you can take to ensure you derive the greatest benefit from your membership in the project. Return to your MyFTDNA page often to find out if other testees have produced close matches to your profile. It is also recommended that you visit the results pages on this website (www.britishislesdna.com) so that you can follow developments in the British Isles DNA project.

If there is something you do not understand or you require assistance entering your ancestral information, please feel free to contact one of the administrators. Contact information can be found here: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/BritishIsles

When you log into www.familytreedna.com and enter your KIT NO. or USERNAME and PASSWORD in the appropriate  boxes, you will be taken to your MyFTDNA page. There are a number of things you can do from this page. Your first order of business should be to enter your ancestral information, as follows:

1. Move your mouse over the My Account menu heading (in the dark horizontal bar near the top) and select Most Distant Ancestors from the drop-down menu.

2. Enter your Direct Paternal ancestor and Direct Maternal ancestor information in the boxes provided (Country of Origin and Name. In the Name box, try to provide sufficient detail that the information will be of help to others who may be researching the same name or location, e.g., John Doe, b. 1815, Yeovil, Somersetshire. Make sure that the names you enter are your DIRECT paternal and maternal ancestors. (On the paternal side, your father's father's father's.... father; on the maternal side, your mother's mother's mother's.... mother.) Don't forget to press Save so the information will not be lost.

3. Under Ancestral Locations, use the UPDATE LOCATION buttons to specify the geographical information for your most distant direct maternal and direct paternal ancestors. Make sure you enter the proper longitude and latitude in decimal notation. The dialogue boxes will walk you through the process of entering geographical data for your Ancestral Locations.

4. Once you have entered information on your Most Distant Ancestors and their Ancestral locations, you can visit the project page at http://www.familytreedna.com/public/BritishIsles and click on Y-DNA Results (Classic) or mt-DNA Results in order to check that your most distant ancestor information appears correctly and that you have been assigned to the correct county subgroup. If you encounter problems at this stage, please feel to contact one of the administrators.

You will use other menu headings to manage your DNA family history research.  For example:

Under My Projects, you can see the projects to which you currently belong and add new projects.

Under Y-DNA and mtDNA, you can check your matches, haplotree, and ancestral origins, as well as order new tests to extend  your profile or refine your haplogroup assignment.

A particularly helpful feature here is the Matches Maps. Here you can view the geographical locations of near and perfect matches to your ancestral DNA on different numbers of markers (12, 25, 37, 67) plotted on a map of the world. This map also enables you to  check whether the locations and coordinates you entered for your most distant direct paternal and direct maternal ancestors are correct. If your ancestor does not appear on the map, or if the location is wrong, you can go back to Ancestral Locations to correct or complete the information there.

A new feature under the Y-DNA menu is the SNP Map. When you select this option you can view the distribution of each haplogroup , including subclades, on the world map. When you select your own subclade, you will be able to determine where your closely related distant relatives resided, and possibly home in on the location where your surname was first adopted by a distant ancestor. To take advantage of this feature, members are encouraged to order as many SNP tests as possible so the subclades they belong to are precisely determined.

Another technique for locating the region in which your surname originated is to note the surnames of any close matches (1-5 mismatches, say) to your Y-DNA on 25 or 37 markers. You can determine the distribution of these surnames, as well as your own, in the 1881 Census of Great Britain at this website: http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org/. You can then look for areas where the highest distributions of these surnames overlap to narrow down the regional origin of your surname within the British Isles. For a more detailed description of this method of identifying your paternal "Genetic Homeland," please visit Tyrone Bowes's site http://www.englishorigenes.com/. Note that similar sites have been created for those seeking Scottish and Irish ancestors. 
http://www.scottishorigenes.com/ and http://www.irishorigenes.com/.

Distribution maps of surnames in the 1881 census are now available for new members on the British Isles DNA website. Simply click here for a list of surname distribution maps. If you wish to have a distribution map for your surname included, please click here.

Under Family Finder you can view and study matches with other persons for whom Family Finder results are posted.

Under Resources, you can deepen your knowledge of Genetic Genealogy and submit your results to the public databases maintained by Family Tree DNA, YSearch and MitoSearch. 

 Note: If your DNA profiles do not appear on the results pages, and you did your DNA testing with Family Tree DNA, you need to fill out the release form. You can obtain the release form from the FTDNA website (http://www.familytreedna.com/forms/FTDNA-release-form.pdf). Just fill it out and mail it back to:

Family Tree DNA

1445 North Loop West, Suite 820

Houston, TX 77008, USA

Your results will then appear on this website and your email will appear to persons with whom you have close matches.