About The FRIEND-DNA Project

Our Objective

As with other surname projects, the objectives of the FRIEND-DNA are to find connections between Friend lines and to hopefully determine the countries of origin of these various families. With the use of documented family trees and good paper trails, we hope to continue our genealogical research beyond what we currently know. Ultimately, by sharing our results and research we believe we might better focus our research efforts.

Project Scope

The scope of our project is all FRIEND males. The early members of our group are living in the U.S.A., however we welcome and encourage those beyond the U.S.A. to join as we believe country boundaries do not apply in the search for ancestral knowledge. Many of us strive to know where our ancestors first lived. The more widespread our database, the more we will all learn. The more we learn, the more we hope to share and help each other.

Our Goals

Our goals are not expected to be hard and fast. We fully expect these to change as our knowledge grows and as each participant asks a new question. Below are just a few of the submitted objectives we have set for our project results:

• "The hope is that the project will link us to another family and location, enabling me to work from both directions, present and past, with conventional genealogy to extend our line."
• "To gain further directive for searching my Friend lineage - in specific, the ancestors of Nicholas Friend of Ohio."
• "To verify my linkage back to a Nils Larsson Frande coming from Sweden on the Swan to Pennsylvania [USA] in 1654."
• "To help others who are trying to connect to my line."
• "To direct future research on Andrew Friend, son of Nicholas Friend, to a location where I might uncover more information on his early years and his parentage, and to find any ties that might exist between the Pennsylvania [USA] Friend families."
• To participate "...because the eldest in our family have always passed along the information that we were Swedish . . . and, I have the feeling we may possibly descend from Sweden not Germany . . ."

Who can participate?

Anyone who is interested. Well, at least anyone can help. You must be a male with direct FRIEND lineage to be tested, since this project is based on Y-Chromosome DNA tests. However, there are other ways to participate. . .

• Help spread the word and identify potential candidates for testing
• Sponsor testing for candidates with limited income or those not willing to pay (but are needed to validate a family line)
• Provide additional pedigree information within the tested family lines

How will this be accomplished?

We haven't selected any DNA services to be used by this project until we have a great demand for a group rate. A surname project has been established with them but until then we are working on your contributions. So help spread the word around and let help make some family ties.