DNA testers who believe they're descended from John Cooley of Stokes County, North Carolina and have uploaded their autosomal DNA test results to gedmatch.com can join this project.1 To participate, contact Michael Cooley.
The public page is limited to the first five generations of the participants' lines.
The project's purpose
The wish of this project is that the autosomes of its member will provide useful genetic-genealogical information regarding John Cooley's descendants in those cases where the Y chromosome has failed us—usually for reason of lack of an eligible tester.
Will it even work?
Understanding Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA test results is straight-forward: Everyone inherits their mother's mtDNA and each man inherits his father's Y-DNA—whole hog, and without exception. The pattern continues generation after generation. In these cases—for Y-DNA and mtDNA—predicting who will likely match is easy. If two people do not match and the genealogy says that they should, then the genealogy is wrong.
Autosomes are different. Only discrete segments pass down to descendants and, except for identical twins, in every instance a different combination of segments is inherited. Rarely, a mutation occurs. (Inherited mutations are the only way father-to-son descendants will have varied Y chromosomes.) An ancestors autosomal DNA signature, therefore, quickly disappears from the population, whereas the Y chromosome and mtDNA perseveres.
"Y cousins" over six generations match
virtually 100%.  The above representation is a gross abstraction and is in no way proportional. |
The inheritance of specific autosomal markers cannot be predicted, but the average number and size of segments can be. For example, an individual will match half of a parent's autosomes. On average, about 3% (or less, never more) of a great-grandparent's autosomes will survive to the present generation.
Although predictions are not likely, surprises happen. This project searches for happy surprises.
Privacy
Genealogists who have been around a while remember when genealogical newsletters published all members' addresses and when books included full lineages. For obvious reasons, the online genealogical community is more careful. Generally, the identity of living people are not included in genealogies and personal contact information is sometimes difficult to find. Although DNA test results are published in some online DNA databases, the identity of the tester is kept under wraps.
As a rule of thumb, I don't mention the names of living people in my posts to the John Cooley Mailing List unless I've been given expressed permission, they've revealed themselves via their own posts, or it's just been a done deal for a long time, such as with Sandy Stanton, Mary Cooley, or Shirley Wilcox. Participants in this project, however, will need to know the full lineages back to John Cooley, contact information, and DNA comparisons for one another. For that reason, the pages at this site are protected by a password. Pages not protected will be so only when the privacy issues (identity, contact information, and genetic information) are not compromised. That's just the way of life on the Net.
Included kits
I possess, in each of my cells, half of my dad's autosomal DNA. I have no "Cooley" bits that he would not have had. Looking at my complete autosomal results would be useless for this project. For that reason, I'll exercise a certain level of discretion in posting lineages and kit numbers. There's just no reason to look at data that isn't relevant or will offer no new information to the project.
GLOSSARY
Autosomes - Chromosome pairs 1-22. The 23rd pair is the sex-chromosome pair, comprised of an X and an X or a Y (X && (X || Y)).
1As is often the case, GedMatch is presently down. Autosome comparisons can be made at David Pike's website.