About Us

The East European Germans FF-SGGEE (Family Finder - Autosomal) DNA Project welcomes all participants. Our only stipulation is that one of your ancestral lines must go back to Poland and/or the Ukraine and should be Germanic.  We encourage you to join today!.

SGGEE is the Society for German Genealogy in Eastern Europe.  We are an international genealogical society registered in Canada that focuses on Germans from Russian Poland and Volhynia and related areas. Our website is www.sggee.org. Participation in this autosomal (Family Finder) DNA project does not require membership.  We are interested in assisting our members to discover their roots, and broader participation assists this goal.

The Family Finder test is an autosomal DNA test that provides DNA information on all of your 22 chromosomes plus your X chromosome(s) and therefore provides information on all of your ancestors.  This test is generally only effective for about 6 generations as the amount of DNA inherited from more distant ancestors is usually too small to be meanfully measured. Everybody can take this test and you can transfer your data file from other testing companies to FTDNA for free.  So if you have tested at Ancestry, MyHeritage or 23andMe you can transfer your results and participate in this project. However, you will generally get better results by retesting here. 

SGGEE also has a Y-DNA project and a mt-DNA project.  To join either of these projects your patrilineal line (Y-DNA) or matrilineal line (mt-DNA) must go back to Poland and/or Ukraine and should be German.  For the Y-DNA project we encourage males to order a Y-67 DNA or Y-111 test but Y-37 markers will be accepted. If you order 37 markers you can upgrade later.  The more markers that you test the easier it will be to know when your common ancestor lived and if your common ancestor is within genealogical history.

For the mt-DNA project,only the mt-FS (Full Sequence) test is beneficial for genealogy and we recommend this test.  Both men and women can do this test. 

To find these projects, do a Surname search with the word “SGGEE” and our projects will show up.

If you have any questions, please contact one of the administrators or go to the SGGEE Facebook page (www.facebook.com/groups/1812539775626960/).