Trace your Border Reiver roots by DNA!

Tracing your family roots has become very popular with Ulster-Scots, but now there's a new project where you can trace your Border Reiver DNA! If you are an adult male of Scots-Irish and are paternally descended from any of the Border Reiver families, you could track your forefathers more effectively by using DNA links.

The Border Reiver DNA Project is a serious genetic and genealogical study
started in March by two customers of Family Tree DNA, James V. Eilliot and David B. Strong.

Although it began as a study of the Elliot Border Reiver family, it has since expanded to include members of other Border Reiver families, including Armstrong, Dixon, Irving, Kerr and Little.

James Elliot confirms: "We are conducting our study of the Border Reiver families using Y chromosome DNA markers, because the Y chromosome is passed, just like a surname, from father to son with very few changes over the generations.                                         

"That makes these DNA markers an ideal tool for tracing paternal descent, and by extension, the history of families."

The Border Reivers, who have thousands of descendents living in Northern Ireland today, rode during a period of extreme chaos in the history of the Anglo-Scottish Border.

Many young mothers were widowed and many children were left orphaned. The social customs of the Reivers, affected by a need for self-reliance and the shifting circumstances of the era, favoured trial marriages, and allowed even married women to keep their surnames.

The larger Border Reiver clans themselves were more like tribes than families, and many born with different surnames joined these clans for protection, eventually assuming the clan surname as their own.

James Elliot adds: "As a consequence of all these factors, Border Reiver descendants are to this day closely interrelated.

"Many with different surnames share the same ancestors, and many with the same surname are descended from genetically distinct paternal lines. Our DNA Project seeks to determine the relationships among these descendants, both on an individual and a family level."

The group rate for joining the Border Reiver DNA project is 99 dollars or £63 for a 12-marker test that can help determine your 'deep ancestry' and can provide enough data to suggest whether or not two individuals share a paternal ancestor within the last 14 -15 generations.

If you are interested in joining the project or for further information, please contact James V. Elliot at jvance@tiac.net.

To check out Reiver family names go to the web page - http://www.reivers.com/namest.htm.