Kia Ora to you too

Wow thank you for that explanation. Will try and get his books. Hope I can understand them.

Best Wishes
Rita

John,
Thanks for your recent post! You reminded me that I bought, "Saxons, Vikings and Celts", probably three years ago. I put it aside for "winter reading", then with an accident and too many "dead people" on my mind, I forgot all about the book! I was about to order it (again) from Amazon, when it occured to me that the cover looked very familar. There it was on my book shelves! Another reason to love the people here and this wonderful site! Thanks!
Cynthia

I'm wondering how many other Forest families may have had success in tracing themselves back through the wonders of biology beyond where written records can help.

The Sterry/Sterrey family of Lydney (my paternal grandmother's line) had been unable to track back beyond a marriage at Minsterworth in the 1790s (Richard Sterry to Ann Toomey or similar) and subsequent movement from there via Awre to Lydney. But, through a project accessed via www.sterryworldwide.com, a living male Sterrey provided a DNA sample a few weeks ago which has turned out to prove that our line connects with the Sterrys of Longhope, thereby linking us to the marriage of a Richard Sterry (then spelt Stirry) there in 1686 and therefore to the putative birth of that progenitor around the early 1660s. This has been achieved despite the fact that the old Longhope registers are in a bit of a state where they survive at all, so that we still can't spell out the tree from the one Richard to the other.

With a spot of speculation, given the proximity of Longhope to Ruardean, we can now imagine ourselves connected to the Sterrys of Ruardean who go back to a marriage there in 1539 (and therefore a birth in say 1515) and are the oldest proven Sterry line in the world. As the order to keep parish registers only went forth in 1537, and early compliance was patchy, we would all be very lucky to prove ancestry older than that.

Without DNA, I would have been stuck at my gt-gt-gt-gt-grandfather's sudden manifestation as a bridegroom in Minsterworth a mere 218 years ago. Anybody had similar joy?

Replying specifically to this request: "If you have results of Y-DNA - Male Tests please send them to me as I shortly intend to add a DNA section to our website..."

I'm co-administrator of a small Y-DNA surname project for a Hulin family that was established in Virginia and North Carolina at least by the 1660s, and probably earlier. (It's hard to prove anything that early, as the surviving records of our southern colonies are spotty; and the spelling of this surname differs from one document to the next.) Anyway, some of us are beginning to have DNA tests, some of us match, and the consensus is growing that there is one pretty stable lineage, within haplogroup R1b, the defining SNPs (so far) being P312+ and Z196+. At the moment the ISOGG haplotree is calling this group R1b1a2a1a1b2* (but this terminology changes, as new SNPs are discovered, so it may not be valid when someone reads this post at a date later than November 2011). Here is a link to our project:

http://www.familytreedna.com/public/Hul_n_/default.aspx

The only British member of the family yet to be tested (Donald Hulin of Clevedon, Somerset) doesn't match our baseline (kit #195834 and similar results); but it seems possible that he actually has a direct paternal ancestor of the Scott family. If you look at the Y-DNA Results page in the project I have linked, Don is kit #195838. We would like to find some other male member(s) of the Forest of Dean Hulin family -- preferably not a very close relative of Don's -- who could be tested, as a check on that question. The company through which we are testing, Family Tree DNA, has a sale in progress (through Dec. 31, 2011) so it's currently less expensive than usual to be tested, if one does so through an FTDNA project such as ours. We recommend 37 marker tests.

If a "Forest of Dean Surnames" project is established by participants in this forum, and the testing is done at a company other than FTDNA, you may still access our public project results and see whether our baseline markers do, or don't, match those found among the Hulins from St. Briavels or Awre.