The Wigington Surname DNA Project was started 4 Jun 2007 with the hopes that there will be many more Wigington family members finding this page with the same desire to find their distant past.
Update - 4 Dec 2007 - It has now been six months since this project was first started. We now have four members. Hopefully, this will pick up in the future as others find out about this project!
Update - 25 Oct 2011 - It has been a little over four years since this project started and we now have 9 members. We need many more members to really draw any conclusions, but it is interesting to note how the name spelling differences can almost predict which markers the individual will have. And then there is the one individual whose markers would suggest that his name would be spelled Wigginton, but he is in the Wigington group. Just interesting differences at this point.
Update - 27 Jul 2014 - We now have 13 members. This is still not enough to come to any conclusions. Hopefully, more individuals will join and help expand our search!
Update - 1 Mar 2021
Total Members 19
yDNA Haplogroups:
Haplogroup G - 11
Haplogroup I - 1
Haplogroup J - 1
Haplogroup R - 6
Tested:
Big Y - 5
Y-DNA111 - 8
Y-DNA67 - 11
Y-DNA37 - 16
Y-DNA25 - 17
Y-DNA12 - 19
When starting this project I was in hopes that in a few years we would know whether or not all Wiggington/Wigginton/Wigington/Wiginton (or any other spelling) immigrants to the US came from just one family line. Due to the small number of individuals joining our project it is still impossible to answer that, but we can draw some conclusions.
We have only one member who comes from the U. K. and his yDNA is not the same as any other members located here in the U. S.
We do have members whose paper trails follow a line that has been identified as belonging to the G haplogroup, but their line belongs to a different haplogroup. From that we might conclude that there was an NPE (Non Paternal Event) somewhere up the line, but it would be impossible to identify what generation without many, many more people testing. Or we could determine that his haplogroup is correct and other's have their paper trails incorrect.
With so few testers it is currently impossible to say which paper trails are correct. The farther back in time we go to identify lineages the harder it is to know for certain that we are correct. Many of us rely on assumptions from combining information from census rolls, probate and will records, baptism/christening records, etc. Either way, there simply could have been an adoption or the taking in of a child from a sister or other relative and that child using the new family's surname would obviously carry a different yDNA haplogroup.
What I can see is that current day Wigington/Wiginton/Wigginton's from the Haplogroup G line do carry different mutations that would be explained by moving down different lines. And if the paper trails are correct several connect back through different lines to William (Aquia Creek) Wigginton.
Please let me know if any of you have different thoughts/ideas on these lineages. I can only compare these families based on my database of Wigington's that I have researched now for 44 years. Like everyone else I'm sure that not all my assumptions have led to the correct answer and I look forward to others correcting my information.
Update - May 3, 2024
Nothing has changed very much in the last 3 years. We do have two more individuals that have upgraded to the Big Y. Not quite half our members, but not bad!
Total Members 19
yDNA Haplogroups:
Haplogroup G - 11
Haplogroup I - 1
Haplogroup J - 1
Haplogroup R - 6
Tested:
Big Y - 7
Y-DNA111 - 8
Y-DNA67 - 11
Y-DNA37 - 16
Y-DNA25 - 17
Y-DNA12 - 19