 Get my glasses out of there if I can help. Excellent. Right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Paul Burns. Now Paul is the project administrator for the Burns-Burn-Burn surname project. And he'll be talking to us on two topics at this year's conference. Today will be an overview of the surname project itself. I know that Burn is a very, very common name all throughout Ireland. I bet that there's many people here who actually have a burn in their family tree. How many people have a burn in their family tree? Okay, we're looking at the majority of the people in the audience. And how many of you have actually done the DNA test and are in Paul's project? We have three people. Okay, so there's a four or five people there that need to do the DNA test and join Paul's project. Paul, any free DNA tests going? No freebies, no. Richard, my co-administrator, was sitting at the front row with about a dozen kits right there in his bag, so please step up. So there's loads of DNA kits available. We'll give you a good discount. Exactly. So there's discounted tests available. Now Paul has been retired for some time, but he did intelligence work in Latin America for 30 years. And he was a private investigator and security advisor. He earned his many talents to the burn DNA surname to investigate and explore exactly where it came from. So Paul is going to reveal what he's found so far and it gives me great pleasure to welcome him all the way from America to Ireland. Welcome. Thank you. Yeah, recruitment is recruitment, whether it's DNA or other fields and endeavor. Anyway, I'm from Tallahassee, Florida. Fourth generation Irish. My family came from County Sligo about 150 years ago, during the famine years. And sailed across the... Let's see if I can work this thing now. Probably going to get a blank here sooner or later. No, there we go. Okay, that's not the ship they sailed in, but it's the only one they could find out in line. They didn't have cameras back in those days. Three-master Bart over to the Sligo Harbor in Quebec went up to St. Lawrence River for 100 miles or so. Like the American shore better, and so they plopped down there in Watertown, New York, and that's where I was born, about four generations later. So that's my great-grandfather. He came over with two brothers, three brothers, two sisters. They all had families that size. And so when Morris and others preached a lot of sample DNA to find cousins, believe me, I don't want any more. I got too many already. And that's my great-grandfather there on the left. Now, in his declining years, he wrote a memoir tracing himself back, oh, I think it was six generations to a Jacobite cavalry officer from County Wicklow, who after the Battle of Akram and Galway in 1691 fled north to Sligo and settled down there. And he supposedly was the progenitor of our Sligo-Bern's family. I spent about 20, 30 years pursuing that tale, trying to prove it, disprove it, couldn't find any record of the Patrick O'Bern Cavalry officer. And when DNA came along, and I had myself tested in early 2005, I think it was, lo and behold, it was all a lie, a tale anyway, because I'm Northwest Irish. I'm not from the clan O'Bern of Lester, which is quite a distinct type of DNA. Now, our project started in, with the testing of me, there was no project at the time, so I started the Bern project in January 2005. And got us that first year, I think we had 32 members, good many of which were from the clan O'Bern of Lester, but it was kind of a scattering. And I thought we would be doing great if we eventually reached 100, we'd be able to divide. And we did, we're not almost 400 members. I put up a chart in the back wall, which is of the project and shows the divisions. I'm not going to use that much, it's too far away anyway, but each of those different colors, groupings is a different source of the name. No two groups are related. These are the certain names in the project. The most common is the BYR in the spelling, as you can see the second line there, 164, top line is where I am, I'm a Bern, B-U-R-N-S, 155. These are all variations, of course. The third name in the project is O'Bern, that's kind of swallows, it's turned out, but we have only 11 in the project, though I tested one just yesterday, making it 12, I hope. And then Breen, O'Brien, Barnes, Bruin, Berni, Berns, I tested a Berns, but he, oops, I got the wrong button here, but let's see now, there we go. But he's not related to anything else. I just thought it might be a variation of one of our names. And when I put others as the NPEs, I think Morris was describing them. We have a lot of people joined the project, possibly related, but one of their ancestors was a Berns. I got a request just two days ago, one man just said very cryptically, he said, I think my mother had an affair with a Berns, period. I said, okay, we'll test your DNA and I'll be able to tell you possibly, because unless a relative of the alleged father is in the database, of course, we won't know. I didn't approve anything, a positive light. The distribution of the project members, we I think are more, have a larger contingent of Irish than many of the projects. Most of the surname project are American based, and we still have two thirds almost in the United States of Canada, but we have a great many, we have 90 members in Ireland, which is 27% of our total. England has to be expected. This is not DNA based, this is residence based, so they are probably Irish too. Scotland, very few, surprisingly, and well, there are bound to be a few conflicts. I trace one, the man in Australia and his ancestors have been sent over for stealing a cow, so that may account for the 3% there. The 90 members in Ireland break down this way, Wicklow, Wexford, the heaviest, Monaghan, surprisingly 13, and you can see the rest. I'm down to the singletons. Now these are the people who live in Ireland. These are not necessarily those who traced to Ireland. That would be quite different, of course. Another chart just showing distribution of the time of Griffith's valuation. The arrows, I put on them before this, I prepared for this lecture, so they're not that meaningful. They're reminders to me of where we should be looking for more people to test. Oops, there we go again. Let's go back to... there, yeah. Obviously, Antrim, Arma, we're weak in the north especially, down. There's an awful lot of burns up there as I'll show you in a minute. The B-U-R-N-S, looks like Fermanagh, Galway, Limerick, surprisingly, and Tipperary. Now why there's so many B-U-R-N-S down there, I had no idea. There were, we're back then. Two of our surnames, again based on Griffith, the burns are pretty obvious from Scotland, I would assume. We don't have too many tested up in that area. My own family, over here, these up here probably are being Y-R-N-E, because most of them out in that area are names that have morphed, and down here I have no idea. And if I'd seen this map a few years ago, I would have gone down to find out. It's been a while since I've been down, and that's far south. The B-Y-R-N-E is pretty obvious, they're concentrated centered in the Wicklows, in Lentster. We have a sizeable group up here, but they turn out to be a different snip, a mutation, and we have a lot here. I'm going to describe these groups in a minute. And let's see now. Then the next, I couldn't find a B-E-I-R-N-E map, but the name Breen figures prominently in our project too, and we have a number in the project from the southern Wicklows area, you might say, still in Lentster. I have a small group of five or six Breenes who are quite separate from the Lentster ones over in this area, and frankly I didn't know that there were so many Breenes up in that area. That, again, is an area we've got to get into and test. Okay, now I'm going to talk about some of the larger groups. I'm not sure the time will prevent all. We have about 30 distinct groups in the project with all those various surnames, none of which is related to any other in genealogical time. So, when we started out thinking that everyone was descended from the Clannell-Bernard Lentster, that was very soon disproved. Then this is a map that one of my project members made of the Clannell-Bernard Lentster that just shows the Wicklow Mountains and some of the cities and areas, not cities, but towns that they centered around. That basically just shows the area where the Clannell-Bern originated and is concentrated today. That should be more dexterous there. The clan was kind of late starting. It was organized probably around 1200 AD. So it's fairly young genetically. And it was fortunate to be in a mountainous area because it survived well into the early 1600s, probably because it was isolated. And it was very hard for the British or the English to get up in there and subdue them. This is a battle of Glenmiller where the clan apparently defeated an army led by Lord Gray in 1580. It's the famous battle at least in Lentster. By 1603, 1609, they built a road into that area and forts and what have you. And the clan was brought under control. But because I think it was kind of concentrated all that time, there's a large number of burn up in those hills to this day. Now we have tested some 95 people from this clan and from the core group of the clan. The clan, of course, consisted of many different haplogroups because this clan at least, and some of the ones I've been working with are more geographic than they are pectoralineal. I guess the word is that they didn't, not everyone descended from a single ancestor. The core group over the 95 people, this is not 95 because this is 67 markers, this is basically 67 markers, fewer. But anyway, it broke down well into the clan. They keep pushing the wrong line here. There. And you can almost see some of the subdivisions forming families like that one, like that's kind of a family, that one's a family, that's a family, and that's a family. This is defined by STRs, by the markers, not the SNPs, which are more permanent and rarer. But this is very useful for relationships for the last 500 years or so, which is what some people are mostly interested in. This shows what one member did in tracing his ancestry back through the generations. And it seemed to correspond with history. Okay, this, okay, I'm passing on now from the clan of Berne of Lentzter. I'm talking about that tomorrow in much more detail, so I'm not dwelling on it now. Many groups in Ireland, I mentioned mine did, my Sligo group. But many others also have oral histories and claims that they descended from the clan of Berne of Lentzter. So I'm just showing some of them. That's a group of male, that's a group of Sligo, my family. A group of Danigal has that. A group in Laos, in fact, a book was written about the O'Berns of Laos, in which it said that a contingent was sent by fake McHugh of Berne up to aid the O'Neill, and they were rewarded by land in Laos. And when they started going back home, they stayed right there. Some others. These are just some of the few, a few of the ones that had that oral history. All of which is wrong, because those groups are all of different DNA. These are Northwest Irish. I think that one is too. And one of these is an Oreo-based McGuire offshoot, and this one in Laos is actually Scottish. Okay, the Northwest, the Nile of the Nine Hostages. That's the second largest group in our project. We have about 55 members. Similarly, we thought they all probably came together some time. In the recent past, after Nile lived, about 450 wasn't AD, but it's becoming obvious that M-222 existed, the identifying SNP existed long before Nile came along. And they currently are dating at about 500 AD, but even that is tenuous, we're still not certain. It moves back and forth depending on the author and the most recent interpretation. But it doesn't discover the Northwest Irish, Northwest Ireland. They discovered it's quite prevalent in lowland Scotland, too. In fact, over here, there are certain indications that M-222 is older in Scotland than it is in Ireland. Again, that's being debated. Some people think it even started over on the continent off the map and came over, but sooner or later we'll know from SNPs. This is Nile. That's supposedly where he hung out, but possibly the Grinanda Aleg from announcing it right up in... Now, I forget. It's just in Derry, I think. And this is an early chart of the M-222. We started using software to help us divide these groups of people with the same known or predicted SNP. And this was 2009, I think, and I started seeing some divisions in the project. I could separate them on a hand group. And that... I can't remember them all. That's Donny Gull. That's my group. One of these, that's me right there, I guess. And I've forgotten now which this group is, whether it could be a group we found over in Brefney. We passed on a more recent test. FTDNA developed a very good test called the Big Y. Britain's DNA in London developed a test, too. And between them, we are now finding a great many divisions below 222. That's up there. We got seven members to come up with the money, because these are not cheap tests. Actually, these are mostly chromo-2 tests, as I recall. But they all tested, and I really thought we might divide about 55 into two or three branches. Instead, it turned out that they all are separate branches. Well, one, two, three, four, five, six. The eight turned into six branches. And then some people with a lot more knowledge than I have, I should put this down. There we go. I'll get back to it. I'm beginning to line up the terminal SNPs in M22, and presumably some other broad categories as well, into geographic units, such as, this is me right here, and that's a man who lives in Kildare, and I forget where he lives, but under 588 they decided, because of the surnames at Vow, that it's probably Ken-a-Lohan. Well, that's great. I've been looking forever for the origins of my family, and that's the first clue I've had. The sligo burns us. Next, people under here, I don't think I have any East Elster, and over Ken O'Connell, and Ephiachra. I can't pronounce these things very well. Ebroon. This man, I had someone tested here, and this man has dropped down there, so now we have two people. And this is surprising, because they live over in Monaghan and Lout, and yet they seem to be related to groups from the far west coast. Now, my group in County Sligo, right across the bay, you can see Kildare, Glen Colomke, that area, where there's a large group of burns, BYR&E, and I always, I just took it for granted that we were related, because life aside, and also O'Donovan in 1834 in a survey letter, he said when he was surveying southwest Danegal, he said there's a great many burns in O'Malley's who have migrated from the far shore. But these are the Danegal burns, and they're about a thousand years separated from my Sligo burns. Well, I don't yet know exactly where they come from, or exactly where we come from, but obviously we came separate routes. Okay, passing on to the third group, largest group is which is the, we call the Monaghan burn cluster. This has, as a terminal step, it's called L513, and it turns out to be about the only group we have that has a good paper pedigree, and it traces back from the Aguayers, of up in Ariella, I think County Fermanah was their center, but they were called, the name was up there, hard to spell, Meg, something. I guess it's pronounced Maguire anyway, and down through the Magmanusus, and then down there to a man named Brand, which is where many, many of these burns groups got their names, from some ancestors named Brand, and the ultimate one, and this is pretty well verified on paper, was this Matt, Brian, Nick, Magnusa, I think. I think I'm pronouncing it right. Okay, right, intermixed with all those L513s, the Monaghan, the Oriole group, there's a small group about crowd people, I think it is, living County Lough, and the ones who thought they came from, from the ancestors came from the Wyclows, did not, they were hard to identify, and just a couple months ago, a, someone who tested one of my people found that he's a new SNP, SNP I never heard of, called S-1051, if it means anything to anyone, and he thinks that they're probably, oh, there we go again, ancient, ancient pect from the pects. I tried to find a picture of a pect, and that's the best I could come up with. I'm supposedly well tattooed, and I think there's tattoos on that man. Now the septal burn, we have about a dozen members of that too, and they of course are centered pretty much in Roscommon and Lytrum. They have that core group, about 12 that test together, but they also have a few members of the Northwest Irish, and they started out with M222, and again I think it's because they were geographic, when the clan was formed, whoever lived in that area became a member of the clan, and of course they didn't have spit tests back then, or saliva tests, so they didn't know they were different, and they probably didn't even have surnames in fact, until they were kind of assigned to them. So, on to the Dow costs about what some other people are going to talk, but surprisingly we have three members who have passed out L226, and yet they traced to Wicklow. Now, it's possible that they are survivors of Brian Baroux's invasion in 1014, when he marched to Clontarf, he sent his son with an army to ravage Southern Lentster, and they could be descendants of the ravished, the people who were ravished, or it could be of course people who moved there later, and we don't know, or it could have been a wounded man left behind, but he probably would have been killed. Anyway, I'm just trying to point out that there's a lot of mixture even way back when. In the clan O'Burn of Lentster, there's a great many people who are not members of the core group, and yet they live in Lentster, and their ancestors always lived in Lentster, but they have a different DNA. Now, many of them are, I'd say, not many, about 10 members. I have I1, haplogroup I1, which is more Viking than anything else, and the Vikings settled along the coast all the way from Dublin down to Waterford, but also in here too, there are plenty in Wicklow's Viking town. I think Arklow also was, and those people probably soon forgot that their ancestors were Vikings and became just berms, when that surname came along, or members of the clan O'Burn when the clan was formed in 1200. As I said earlier, there were no tests back then, so there's no way to tell, but of course that haplogroup was passed down by the father to son over the generations. Okay, Robert Burns, almost, well, very many people joined the project with a surname Burns, including their email to me, their request to join, that their oral history is that they dissent from the poet, Robbie Burns, but unfortunately I have to go back and say Robbie Burns didn't have any legitimate descendants, and his name wasn't Burns to begin with. It was Bernès, B-U-R-N-E-S-S. Also, I'm pretty sure that... Where are you? That Robbie was... A lot of the Bernèses are haplogroup I, or I2B1, I'm not sure which it is, but they're not R1B, which is what most of the Irish are. They could be in there. There was... Professor Gates had a program the other day in which he interviewed some celebrity in the United States named Burns, and at the end of it, there's the final surprise which he said told the man that he's probably related to Robbie Burns as a poet. And he's a man named... He's a celebrity, he's named Burns, and he happens to be a member of the project, and he's not related to the poet. I can't correct Professor Gates, so I didn't... I'm not going to send anything out. I can't say the man isn't either. We're still trying to determine his terminal haplogroup. But... In the Scots contingent, there are some others. U106, I have quite a sizable group of U106 in the project. I'll name Burns, mostly named Burns, B-U-R-N-S, possibly all. And most live in the United States. I think only one of about 25 lives here in Ireland. And so I can't tell whether they actually... whether they're Scott Irish, which is what, you know, my first suspicion that they settled in North Ireland first. The hotspot was Frisia. And suppose the U106, I had to step out. Mr. Larkin was talking, but I think they crossed over to England, Lowland, Scotland, to Scotland, to Northern Ireland. But I think many of mine probably went directly to the United States. I don't know how I'm going to be able to resolve that or whether it really matters that much to them. Also, we have 7-10 DF-27s. Now, they... there are R-1B, but they're a little bit apart from the 80% of Irish who are R-1B, L-21, and I got to admit it. But the only interesting thing to me is that the three I have live over here in County Clair, County Galway, and there are records of a lot of trade between Spain and Galway City. So, maybe that's how they... the connection. Of course, the legend is that Ireland was subtle from there, but there's not that much DF-27 in Ireland today to... verify that claim. Well, that's... I should say before this slide that we have... we also have many other haplogroups. We have a couple of Gs. We have a couple of Es. We have a J2. I'm naming SNPs for those of you who are not familiar with them, which are rather strange in Ireland, but do occur. The J2 is kind of a western Mediterranean. You know what I'm touching? I'm touching this thing, but I... I didn't know that. I'm using both hands to change slides. Now, this is a kind of a success story, a DNA success story that I could face here instead of looking at the screen all the time. I had a man from New Mexico ask to join the project a couple years ago, and his name was Val Des, a Mexican name. V-A-L-D-E-Z Joe Val Des, or Jose Val Des, and I went back and said, why do you want to join the burn project? It was a name like Val Des. And, well, his great-grandmother was a servant girl in the house of a politician named Burns, and she had a baby. And they think that he was a good man. But they were never able to verify that. Esther Burns provided some financial support to the child, but he never allowed that it was his. So I said, sure, Joe, we tested Joe, and he turned out to be a perfect match, his perfect 67-67 match with a man from New Zealand named Burns, B-Y-R-N-E, who had done a good job of tracing the story of Clara Castle in Kilkenny. Well, Clara Castle Kilkenny is still occupied by a Burns family, and Anthony, the man from New Zealand who had moved to the States in the meantime, had been working on him a long time to DNA test. So I think he finally convinced him because of the story of the connection with New Mexico and with the cowboy. Mr. Burns was a ranch owner. And sure enough, the Kilkenny burn turned out to be not a 67-67 match, but 67-66, which is very, very close. So then we turned the paper, of course. Then you have to turn the paper because DNA really is a tool. You can't use it by itself to verify anything. And all three, we eventually found all three tracing back to three brothers who had left well, whose father had been in the Clara Castle or his farm brother anyway. And one brother stayed there to farm. One went to New Zealand. One went to New Mexico. So this was a happy story. Let's see if I just push this. Yeah, there we go. This story was not quite so happy. I had a burn who didn't seem to match any other burns. And I looked at his matches and he matched, he didn't match any burn on the 67 that he tested to, but he matched about six or seven or eight men named Cole, C-O-L-E and a man named Bentley as well. So I corresponded with the administrator of the Cole project and he said, yeah, he'd noticed that burns too. And we looked into it. He had from the Cole end to me from the burn end and we discovered that Cole had lived in the little town on Rhode Island at the same time that a burn family, the burn family that was in my project, that their ancestors lived in that same little town and also a family named Bentley had lived in that little town. Well, my burn family in the meantime later had moved to a town in Connecticut and the only record we could find was that Mrs. Burns had to stand up and meeting one day in a religious meeting and make a confession. I think it's pretty obvious. So the Bentley and the Cole was the culprit and the Bentley and my burn really are Cole's. Not what they thought they would. My burn had died in the meantime so he wasn't disappointed, but I haven't heard since from his descendants. And then one last one here a man named Wheeler joined the project and said told me this story that he was descended from a man named Robinson whom he thought was a Burns and I checked Wheeler's DNA and yes he could very well have come from the Clannel Burn of Lentster but the story was that in 1938 a Canadian soldier named Robinson who had been adopted and left his girlfriend pregnant when he went off to war in Europe. Well about a year later after the baby was born Robinson's best friend came back from Europe and said Bill had died in battle but he was willing to marry the baby the girl if she gave up the baby and she agreed she gave the baby to her sister sister then later got divorced and had put the baby up for adoption. It was adopted by a family name McCard or something like that and was raised as McDougald I never heard that elsewhere McDougald and was raised as a McDougald but Wheeler was a legitimate child himself but he changed his name to Wheeler because his maternal line his mother's parents did not have a male son and so he decided to honor them becoming a Wheeler McDougald I forget the mother's name Bill Robinson was raised by an aunt who either had illegitimate child herself or had picked him up in an orphanage but it was a long and very confusing road and we still don't know the answer I've asked him to please check the Canadian records and see if we can find out where Bill Robinson was and what happened to him because it must be in the Army records you think but he so far hasn't done that okay now this map just is an overlay of all the various groups I've been describing to show that you can't use the name itself as a proof of origin there are plenty of other groups too these are just the principal ones I won't dwell on that anymore this is the map of L21 which is about 80% of Irish R1B L21 you can see the very great many branches that it has and the great many subdivisions within each branch and those are just the principal ones the current stage of DNA testing is expanding this map almost by the week and with those stars I've tried to designate where most of our members are located and you can see we cover almost every group the one bottom right is Clan O'Burn Leinster light blue and the one to the purple east to the far left at the bottom that's the M222 the Northwest Irish and so on and so forth and over there on the right hand edge I have some of the other haplogroups we have in the project we have 27U106 R1B but they're not L21 they're kind of parallel branches U16 being much older I won I2B1 and those others probably diverged from R or R drivers from them back 10-20,000 years well what have we learned I should just say not much name spelling and pronunciation are very weak clues and we've found the three spellings for example B-U-R-N-S-B-Y-R-N-E and D-E-I-R-N-E can all be in the very same haplogroup the location helps identify the clan origins but not deep ancestry without snip confirmation same thing there's often different clusters with the same surname well obviously yeah there's B-Y-R-N-E clusters all over the place and the problem of course is that almost all of them come from some ancestor named Bran which apparently is very common back aways many clans are certainly in my project are geographic rather than patrilineal I suppose some of the smaller ones could be patrilineal and some of the younger ones I don't know non-paternal events were frequent 30% of generation if you're going back 10 generations it's 30% chance of an illegitimacy or an adoption and so on so people trace back too many too far they're on kind of shaky grounds I think oral history more often wrong than not well that's my own experience I was in 20-30 years trying to trace my great-grandfather's story and turn out to be false now I don't know if everyone's had that experience but it's something to keep in mind and it's something I have to keep reminding as I said of these people who claim to be descended from Robert Burns okay and where do we go from here well obviously we need more tests we need more people with money or we need a rich angel to give us 100,000 euros so that we can spend for him the tests we need are still quite expensive they're coming down fortunately new tests are being added all the time so there is hope and it's a very fast changing field SNPs are the name of the game to me more than STRs but STRs are also very valuable we need to fill out the this Brad Larkin did in large part compare the genetic trees to the ancient pedigrees and try to bring them into alignment there's a lot of thoughtification of course with the ancient pedigree but not all and then lastly this is my project coat of arms I'm sure no one recognizes it because it's made up by a project member you can see the this is from the client who burned the hands and part of it is from the septal burn and some is from Robert Burns and I don't know what other shields he found to use in it but anyway if anyone wants to use it it's not copyrighted so that's about it folks and I hope I haven't confused you too much thank you very much thank you very much Paul for this presentation does anybody have any questions for Paul? yeah we have a question here from Jim as a project administrator I've often wondered who I should dump out of my surname project to view giving any thought to asking these people to develop their own group you mean divide the project? actually yes I've been talking to Richard my co-administrator just about that earlier it's getting to be too much for one person I mean we have co-administrators but frankly I've been doing all the work it's my hobby and I enjoy it but it's getting too big and I'm thinking of splitting, not splitting off but dividing the work within the project I think it would be advantageous to keep it all together and have Richard handle the largest hunk which is the Glen O'Bernard Lenster to which he belongs and my other co-administrator who's from Manahan group handle that portion together L513 we have two or three little groups of 513 I don't yet know the terminal SNP is that what you mean? and then I would keep the the dreg so to speak you pointed out you've got all these different groups that seem to have no connection to each other that they don't? they don't have connection well do they? no they don't there's a certain name but Kelly's, Murphy's you name any very common name in Ireland you're going to find all kinds of unrelated Kelly groups around the country Kavanaugh, big Kavanaugh in South Lenster, big Kavanaugh in over in Sligo but they're not related they just happen to wind up with the same anglicized name another question? a little bit to what extent would a project like yours link up with other projects about other servings? because you had a number of greens from the Limerick area in your project the green would be a recognizable version of the spelling Brian from a Limerick perspective I would say well those are more likely to be O'Brien's than they are to be we have O'Brien's in the project too yeah do you how does one certain name project link up with another certain name project? if I thought that I recommend the way it links up is that I mentioned the three people who live in or trace to Wicclaw who are L226 Brian Barul Delcasse I make sure they join the L226 project in all cases I try to make sure everyone joins the Haplogroup project too a geographic project whichever I'm constantly urging people to join other projects and not just ours sometimes I tell a man to drop out of the project entirely but very seldom if his name is Burns or a variation I'd rather he stay in the project Haplotape with the same set of markers and then so I'll know it's kind of a shortcut in a way so it's working out pretty well that way I suppose as well there are various other certain name projects that people could join so is there an O'Brien's certain name project? yes, yeah so one individual could join several projects because I suppose at the very beginning when we start these certain projects we don't know what is a true variant of the core name and what isn't having Brian's and Burns in the same project house to distinguish between between them and see if there is any link and then maybe with some individual families but not with others also you mentioned Breen and I skipped a step here because I'm going to lecture more extensively on the Clano-Burn tomorrow where the Clano-Burn of Lenster came from the E-Falen which is much older back 700 AD and then in 1150 a group called E-Breen well from Bran B-R-A-I-N moved up into the Wicklows and later split into the Breen's and the O'Burn's probably the O'Breens I don't know and we have several Breen's in the project who are definitely Clan-Burn of Wicklow but we have other Breen's in the project who are not related because they can come from the Ulster area and they all tie together down there not sure yeah so you're just asking the question about the Breen's of Wexford well I think the Breen's of Wexford and Kilkenny are the same the documentary records for Wexford there's a project that's been run by the Place Names Commission of Ireland or by somebody who works for them identified among the earliest records of the different land holdings of different families in Wexford one group is the Breen's of Wexford so there is good documentary records of the Breen land holdings in Wexford from the 16th century I think it is so it would be very interesting to put him in touch with the group and see what synergy develops out of that yeah one of my Clarno Byrne Breen's he doesn't think well anyway it's a very ancient division the branch that the two Breen's belong to along with several these people from Clara Castle are talking about they seem to tie into the main, they're all L-255's so they're all from this Lentster fire but the counting snips and multiplying by 150 years between snips which some people think is an average takes them way back to what wasn't 850 AD or something when that branch broke away from the main E-Breen branch am I getting that right Richard yeah I'm forgetting my date so it's in my other lecture but that's what we're doing now is multiplying the snips that are being identified there's a lot of argument whether the average between snips is 150 years some say it's only 117 years I'm hoping they'll bring it down to 100 years it's gonna make more sense to me many of these connections go too far back in time to be you know to be logical we have a question here from John Colgan John Colgan John Colgan is my name I run the Colgan project of course it's very minuscule by comparison of yours about 10% of the number how many markers are you lucky at in most of these members is it 37 well we had a recruitment drive last fall in Lentster and we recruited 42 members 37 is what we signed them up for it's really not helpful we need especially in close knit groups young groups such as the clan Oberman of Lentster we need at least 67 but you'll see them in my chart I got a great many 67 we've managed to talk a lot of people into that and we're having trouble now advancing to 111 what it was 300 and some odd dollars for 111 test and it's hard to sell that 12 isn't useless you know that 125 I don't even put 12 on the chart I have a suggestion to you I've been working out the number of Colgan's for 100,000 people per county using the senseless figures for 1901 and I worked out an analogous piece of information based on written evaluation if you assume the propensity to be a tenant is the same as the propensity to exist in a county and then you can work out an analog what I'm saying is if you work out the number per 100,000 per county you may be able to identify places where they originate I suspect with the burns burns that they're much older and that much more fumes and you won't find places I know that the Colgan's in Lancetre come from Avli and Kedair and there's another cluster up in Badiqal and County Dairy are under there and that's about it are you working mostly with STRs? are you working mostly with the markers? with? marker values we were talking about 37 but not the SNPs they don't know anything about SNPs so far they were just smart because you mentioned Lancetre is your project basically Lancetre oriented? no they're where they come from I have several from America from Britain because of migration I take them wherever I get them uh-huh what I was leading up to is most Lancetre clans are very close genetically we started out with we made a clano burn model way back I forget 2005-2006 I think I did it with just seven members and that held we called it the burn model for a long time and then it was changed to the Lancetre model because it seemed to apply to so many other names so many other surnames from the Lancetre area and then they changed it to the Irish Sea model because it also seemed to affect some clans on the other side of the Irish Sea like Betty from the Scotland border England border the last point I found already like you that they're not all the one family as it were they're disparate groups in different parts of the country you think when they have the same surname that they're all recently related but they're not and it's just at this point that's the reality there's a question here from the internet actually did it originate as a place name from the sheep growing region near Killarney called the burns well of course a lot of the Scottish the name burn from the Scotland especially came from Creek and so on I thought that would be the situation here in Ireland but they tell me no it's not used that much I think it comes more from Bran question from Jared thank you Paul, great talk you mentioned the next generation sequencing SNP tests the issue with costs the big white test is over $500 so I think FTDNA announced last week we'll have clusters of SNPs so under M222 they'll be offering maybe 100 group together at a cost of about 1 or 2 this is a deep claim test I heard it was coming out but I'm over here it starts with M222 and then it'll go across all of the other major ones under M21 and so on and so forth so that'll reduce the cost of an individual SNP from $39 to about $2 which is a big increase now they'll be one group together so it'll be a land of... it's going to be very very helpful if you can get 2 per surname that will definitely improve the research 2 per cluster 2 per cluster 2 per surname it wouldn't do us much good in this project but it'll be a big help I have about 2930 people on that chart back there whom I had to say 9 a group because I don't know what they are where they belong they don't match anyone else but they will benefit by such a test because at least we'll find out their major division assuming they're L21 or whatever DF27 whatever we'll find out what they are then we can do a group test for M222 as well at a reduced price but that's the first one it's a vastly it's a rapidly changing field oh it needs more money well it remains just to thank you Paul for a wonderful lecture and to say to the the burns who haven't tested yet there is a special discount that Paul is talking about you can get it downstairs in the family treaty and I'd like to ask you to show your appreciation to Paul Burns or from Richard because we have left over from last year okay