William Hartwell the English immigrant ancestor of thousands of Hartwells in America, settled in Concord, Massachusetts, in the year 1636. While many of us Hartwells cannot yet definitively trace our ancestry back to William using traditional genealogical methods, Y-DNA testing has provided a way for us to help us find out how we are related to each other. The Hartwell Family Y-DNA project was recently launched with this goal. All men with the Hartwell surname are invited to participate, and all women with Hartwell ancestry are encouraged to prod their Hartwell men to participate.

The test to take is Y-37 (good), Y-111 (better) or Big Y-700 (best) from FamilyTreeDNA.com. The results have already worked as I have already found a Hartwell cousin using a Y-DNA match in the FTDNA database. Let’s combine forces to find out more about our Hartwell ancestors. The more Hartwells that take the test and upload their results and family trees, the more we will collectively know about our ancestry.