Monday 25 October 2010

Welcome to the Scottish DNA Project Blog

In our first posting we would like to briefly highlight some recent administrative changes, explain the aim of this blog and look to the future.

The project was started by John Hansen in October 2001 as the Scottish Clans and has grown steadily as family historians have utilized genetic genealogy as a tool to advance their research.  In the spring of 2010 John handed over administration of the project to the genealogical studies team at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Also stepping back after many years committed service to the project is Martha Smith who regularly updated results in the master database. The current project team would like to express sincere thanks to both John and Martha for all their hard work over many years.  Lauren Boyd continues as admin of the RootsWeb Scot-DNA mailing list and Charlotte Broun as overseer of the My Family Scottish DNA community website. For further details of these community resources see http://www.scottishdna.net/community.html

You will probably have noticed that the name of the project has been changed from the Scottish Clans to the Scottish DNA Project. The new name was thought more appropriate and better reflects the revised project goals especially as many lineages with Scottish origins have never belonged or been known to belong to any traditional family grouping or clan.

This blog is primarily a platform to keep participants and individuals informed of project news and general developments in the field of genetic genealogy with particular emphasis on Scottish DNA Studies. As a national project we recognise the very important and pioneering work undertaken by many independently run projects whether they be clan, family, surname or haplogroup.  We aim to support, promote and encourage the best possible participation of these projects.

If you are the administrator of a Scottish orientated DNA project and would like the opportunity to have it highlighted in this blog to recruit members, please drop us an email at scottishdna@strath.ac.uk

We have a number of ideas for the Scottish DNA Project in the months ahead so do please sign up to follow the blog and keep informed.  We appreciate constructive feedback from interested parties.