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Our seventeen-year-old Project gained three participants this year, raising our membership total to 109. Fifty-five (half) of them have tested at the Family Tree DNA firm (FTDNA). Most of the others tested years ago at Ancestry.com, when it offered requisite Y-DNA testing, or have tested more recently for specific Y-SNPs at the YSEQ firm. A few (unknown) men have taken advantage of the self-test opportunity that we enable at YSEQ (see: http://acreetree.net/ydnaselftest.html), which has confirmed or disproved their lineages privately, without needing to join our Project itself. (YSEQ posts test-result totals publicly without identifying its customers in any way.)
Two of our three newcomers, surnamed Acree, testing at YSEQ, have confirmed their descent from William Acree (c1710-c1767) of Hanover Co. Virginia, one from his son John Sr., the other from his son Abraham.
The third newcomer, surnamed O'Laker, testing at FTDNA, was found to match the three Oldakers in our Project, who are closely related to the genetic group called the "New Jersey (NJ) Akers."
The table below summarizes how our 109 participants, listed by surname in the rows, fit into identified genetic groups in the columns. (Jasper Acree, a prolific, celebrated Civil War soldier, was an orphan whose father is unknown. Those in the Singles column lack matches with any of the other participants.) In its Totals column, the table shows that 65 of us share the name Acree, that a total of 22 of us have variants of the Acree name, and that 22 of us have entirely different surnames. The latter (those in the "Others" row) have joined our project because their test results, in most cases, associate them closely with identified genetic groups, indicating that they share ancestors with Acree/Akers participants who lived a few hundred years ago.
| Participants | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Genetic Groups | VA Acree | MD Acree | NJ Akers | VA Acra | Jasper | Singles | Totals |
| Acree | 55 | 3 | - | 1 | 3 | 3 | 65 |
| Acrey | 2 | - | - | - | - | 1 | 3 |
| Akrie | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | 1 |
| Acrea | - | 1 | - | - | - | - | 1 |
| Acra | - | - | - | 1 | - | 2 | 3 |
| Akers | - | - | 4 | - | - | 2 | 6 |
| Acres | - | - | - | - | - | 1 | 1 |
| Ackers | - | - | - | - | - | 1 | 1 |
| Dacre | - | - | - | - | - | 1 | 1 |
| Oldaker | - | - | 4 | - | - | - | 4 |
| Acord | - | - | - | - | - | 1 | 1 |
| Others | 13 | 6 | 1 | - | - | 2 | 22 |
| Totals | 71 | 10 | 9 | 2 | 3 | 14 | 109 |
Last year's report stated that our Project would make a special effort to ascertain the specific origin in England of the above William Acree (c1710-c1767) of Virginia, who is the progenitor of most living Acrees, including over half (58) of our participants.
Our Project has concluded that William came to Colonial Virginia as a young man about 1730 within a wave of Scots-Irish immigrants. Genetic and genealogical evidence, combined with family lore, indicate that he came from an Ackers family who lived in 17th-century Lancashire, with earlier origins in the western English-Scottish border area, where its members may have been associated in some way with the 14th-century Dacre Barony. "Ancient DNA" (early historical genetic) discoveries suggest that William descended more distantly from a Norse Viking who arrived on the northwestern shores of England a thousand years ago. Further evidence of William's Lancashire origin in the 1600s is provided by the fact that some of the men who closely match the 58 Virginia Acrees genetically (including the 13 "Others" in the first column and a few more who closely match them in FTDNA comparisons), surnamed Ashley, Brown, Collier, Cowpe, Hall, Peel, Tweedale, Unsworth, Wells, Williamson, and Willoughby, are known through family research to have patrilineal lines that extend to 17th century Lancashire, specifically to the 65-mile corridor stretching from Liverpool to Leeds. It's likely that all participants belonging to the Virginia-Acree group had origins in that vicinity.
During this past year, as planned, we attempted to convince two dozen Ackers/Akers men with roots in that area and discoverable addresses in England to take a simple Y-DNA test to confirm our genetic relationship (through possession, by one or more of them, of the Virginia-Acree group's rare, distinguishing microallele 13.2 at DYS385b). Though we offered to pay for these inexpensive single-marker tests at YSEQ, none of the men have responded in any way to our letters, which is unfortunate, to say the least. If just one of them had been willing to help us and was found to possess the special microallele, we would have followed up by researching his patrilineal line (for him, as well as for us) which may have yielded William's elusive early ancestry in England and helped to discern genealogical relationships among the "Others" in the group (who also possess it).