ACREE SURNAME DNA PROJECT

Progress Report for 2025

Our nineteen-year-old Project gained two participants this year, raising our membership total to 114. Fifty-nine of them,including one of the 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, as did the other newcomer. 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.

one of our newcomers, surnamed Acree, has confirmed his 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 other newcomer, surnamed Acra, has not yet received his test results.

The table below summarizes how our 114 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 68 of us share the specific surname Acree, that a total of 23 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-two 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.