ACREE SURNAME DNA PROJECT

Progress Report for 2024

Our eighteen-year-old Project gained three participants this year, as it did last year, raising our membership total to 112. Fifty-eight of them, including the three newcomers, 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 revealing 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 descent from the early Acree forefathers privately, without any necessity 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, have confirmed their descent from William Acree (c1710-c1767) of Hanover Co., Virginia, the ancestor of most living Acrees. Our Project has determined that he was a Scots-Irish immigrant from an Ackers family that lived in the Liverpool-Leeds area of 17th-century Lancashire, England. His paternal ancestors lived a few centuries earlier in the western English-Scottish border area, having descended from a Norse Viking of ancient Germanic origin who arrived on its shores a thousand years ago.

The third newcomer, whose ancestral surname is Hale, was found to match the genetic profile of a different William Acree (1752-1833) of Frederick Co., Maryland, a Revolutionary War veteran and forefather of nearly all other living Acrees. Our Project has determined that this second William was a son of a man surnamed Akers who lived in that area and was, in turn, a son of a man (probably an early English immigrant) surnamed Akridge, whose origin is unknown. This participant somehow descends from this genealogical line.

The table below summarizes how our 112 participants, listed by surname in the rows, fit into our four discovered genetic groups in the columns. Jasper Newton Acree (1839-1911), 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 67 of us share the specific surname Acree, that a total of 22 of us have variants of the Acree name, and that 23 of us have entirely different surnames. The latter (those in the "Others" row) have joined our project because their test results, in nearly all cases, associate them closely with the identified genetic groups, indicating that they share ancestors with the Acree-variant participants who lived in the British Isles a few hundred years ago.

Thirty-one of our participants have now taken or upgraded to the highly-definitive (and expensive) "Big-Y" test at FTDNA, which has distinguished them individually and enabled our Project to make otherwise unattainable genealogical and historical associations, particularly with regard to the early origins of our genetic groups.