Rev. 0; October 21,2013

For many years several family history researchers have attempted to construct a documented family tree going back to John and Elizabeth Blanchet of Amelia County, Virginia in the early to mid 1700s.  Although Blan* family groupings can be documented reasonably back to about 1800, most of the trails grow cold for lack of documentation.  So there is a gap from about 1750 in Amelia County to the early 1800s in various locations in Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

The advent of Y-DNA testing around 2000 provided promise of an added tool that genealogists could use to determine relatedness of males.  Because a man’s Y-DNA typically passes essentially unchanged from father to son for several generations, those test results are useful to determine whether two men may share a common male ancestor from generations in the past—father, grandfather, great grandfather, etc.  By means of Y-DNA testing, sixteen men from around the U.S.A. whose Blan* surnames are spelled seven different ways have been shown to be related closely; perhaps they share a most recent common ancestor within the last 300 years.  That group of men is designated as Group 6 within the Blanchard Family DNA Project at Family Tree DNA.  They are related closely, but unfortunately the Y-DNA testing to date has not enabled the family researchers to pin down exactly what the structure of their family relationships has been.

Females don’t possess Y-DNA, but every person possesses mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which is passed from mother to each child.  So a person’s mtDNA results will match those of the person’s mother, her mother, her mother, and so forth for many, many generations in the past.  At one time it was hoped that mtDNA testing could be complementary to Y-DNA testing.  But so far mtDNA has been of little value for this purpose.

 As testing capabilities have continued to improve and costs come down, autosomal DNA (atDNA) has begun to show promise as an added tool for clarifying family relationships within the last four or five generations.  A person’s atDNA consists of contributions from each of the person’s ancestors, male and female.  Roughly half comes from each parent, who in turn each received roughly half of their DNA from each parent, and so forth.  So theoretically, every person will possess about 3% of their atDNA from each one of their 32 ancestors of the past five generations.  Thus every ancestor passed down some information in the form of the atDNA they contributed.

That information from the atDNA results can often be helpful when compared with information in the atDNA results of another person.  If a reasonable segment of the DNA is a match between the two people, and the two people have ancestors with the same surname, that can provide a hint that could justify further investigation, possibly including additional testing of other people who may be in the family network.  The nearness of genetic relationships can often be inferred from the goodness of the matches.

By no means is this straightforward yet—it’s not a given.  Early results have been puzzling.  For example, sometimes the match has been better between likely seventh cousins than between almost certain 3^rd or 4^th cousins.  But as more and more people test and compare,a few success stories have been showing up. As a result of being able to look for matches of DNA contributed by all of one’s ancestors rather than by just those in the direct male or female lines, some new relationships are being uncovered.  So the hope is that with continued growth of the database, more such successes will occur.

The Blanchard Family DNA Project was initiated as a Y-DNA project and remains today with that primary purpose.  So this Blanchet Project was created as an atDNA project tailored specifically toward the men of Group 6 of the Blanchard project and all other members of the extend Blan* clan who may be associated with that group.  All associated surnames are welcome, both male and female.