(from the previous admin, managing the project from 2012 to 2020)

My name is Sean Powell, and I am the administrator of this project.  I am a direct descendant of Pierre de LaFond, born ca. 1590 in St-Laurent-de-la-Barrière, St. Jean D'Angély, Saintes, Saintonge, France.  His son, Étienne sieur de LaFond, emigrated to Québec about 1640, where my lineage runs to the town of Trois Rivières, Québec, and later to Argyle, Minnesota.

The Lafond DNA Project is made up of several very distinct lineages, who are not all related to each other.  This diversity within the surname is a result of at least two possibilities (perhaps both):

(1) The surname has multiple independent origins.

(2) Some of the people who are now named Lafond obtained that name due to a "non-paternal event" (as it is known in the genealogical lingo) that caused somebody's name to change from their family's original name.  Some examples of events that can lead to such a change are adoption, infidelity, war (with captives or conquered peoples adopting the surname of their conqueror), divorce or death of a father (followed by the mother renaming her children to her maiden name), remarriage (followed by the children taking on the surname of the new father), a father voluntarily changing his surname (e.g., after emigrating, or to change his surname to his wife's), or several other causes.  These events are far more frequent than most people realize, and it is likely that many of us in the Lafond project originally came from families with a different surname, perhaps many centuries ago.

I highly recommend that anybody who has only tested at the 12- marker level (FTDNA's YDNA12 test) should upgrade to a minimum of 37 markers.  67 or 111 markers is far better, and most serious family researchers will eventually upgrade to one of the latter two levels.  You can save a lot of time and expense by starting with this upgrade, rather than upgrading in steps.  There are several reasons for this recommendation:

(1) It is possible to be a perfect 12/12 match with somebody, yet not be closely related to them (or even distantly related).  It is a common occurrence for people who were previously 12/12 matches to "lose the match" when they test more markers, because they only happened to match on the first 12 markers by random chance (or genetic "convergence").  A close match with 37, 67, and especially 111 markers is far less likely to happen by chance, and an upgrade is the best way to confirm a tentative 12-marker match.

(2) The converse is also possible, that a mismatch on a 12-marker test (causing somebody to fail to appear at all in your list of matches) can turn into a match when more markers are tested.  Using an extreme example, if somebody is only a 9/12 match on a 12-marker test (75% of the markers match), they will not show up at all on the list of matches on your FTDNA personal page.  If that person then upgrades to a 67-marker test, and the remaining markers are a perfect match, they now become a 64/67 match (96% of the markers match), which is highly significant and indicates a near-certain relation.  Though an example this extreme is not especially likely to happen with numbers like these, it does serve to illustrate a possible outcome.

(3) The more markers you test, the more accurately you can narrow down the confidence level for the time to your most recent common ancestor (TMRCA).  While testing more markers will not increase your relatedness to somebody per se, it will help you say with a greater confidence level, that, for example, you shared a common ancestor with him in the last 5 generations.  For example, instead of the chance of a common ancestor within that timeframe being only 50%, you might be able to increase those odds to, say, 90%, if the markers continue to match as more markers are tested.  Please be aware, however, that estimates of TMRCA's are only statistical tools, and no degree of testing will allow you to identify the year when your common ancestor lived.  That's where supplementing your DNA data with conventional paper trails come into play.

It is very important to help get as many new members into the project as possible, to help tease apart the relationships between the various lineages shown in the results page.  If you discover a DNA match to you, please encourage him to join the project!  Furthermore, if your paper trail research has identified any distant cousins and you are able to make contact with them (I can help suggest ways to discover and make contact with such people), please encourage them to join.  This will help you confirm that they are indeed kin (paper trails can be very misleading at times!), and will also help determine where mutations in your lineage may have occurred.  For the latter purpose, the more distant the cousin, the better. 

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Project managed from 2023 by Denis Beauregard (also in the French Heritage project with similar goals)