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Spring 2014
Here is a current snapshot of our project statistics:

106 total members of which 97 are participants in the Y-DNAtesting. The remaining members are affiliated with Lock/Locke families but areparticipating in Family Finder or mtDNA testing only.

Here’s a breakdown of the number of Y-DNA kits per number ofmarkers tested:

12 marker test = 23

25 marker test =  8

37 marker test = 30

67 marker test = 33

111 marker test = 3

What the above figures illustrate is that almost one third ofour project members have tested below that 37 marker level. While that is notall that bad by itself, higher levels of testing can verify or even prove aconnection were none seems likely at these levels.

Mail Call! (or Not!)

In other news, I was looking through the status of the members we have in our project and I noticed that there are several (more than several) members who have their accounts set up to not report any matches at the 12 marker or 25 marker levels. A few other members have their accounts setup to not report any matches with any tests that are not registered with our project. That should not stop one of these kits from seeing their match with you (should one occur), but they would not be able to contact you about your match because these same settings do not allow your contact information from being shared with matches on these blocked levels.

I imagine the reason for these settings is to eliminate heavy loads of emails for non-Locke matches at these lower levels.  I can understand that, but an additional consequence of these settings is that Donald and I cannot see any of these matches either.  I personally look through every match notification that is received for every project member every week, looking for any Lockes that might have tested but that have not registered with our project. I realize that the chances of finding one are small, but they exist none the less.

I know this from firsthand experience because a Family Finder kit that I administer for one my family members had a match just earlier this month with a Locke man who is *not* registered with our project. I sent him an email and invited him to join our project and I am waiting to hear back from him. Using this one example, I can’t help but feel that there might be other Lockes who have Y-tested at only the 12 or 25 marker levels and are not registered with our project. If any one of these kinds of matches occurs with one of our project members who have restricted their account settings as described above, then Donald and I will not see that match either. That is one of the duties that Donald and I do as Project Administrators, helping support you with your own Genetic Genealogy search by keeping an eye on the bigger, overall picture of matching kit reports and looking for matching kits for project members.

The point of this long-winded discussion is to ask you all afavor. If any of you *happen* to receive an email from a Locke asking about aY-DNA match with you, and you determine that they are not currently a project member, please invite them to join our project, or better yet, ask them to contact Donald or myself so we can determine if they would be willing to join our project.  I suspect this would be a rare occurrence, but in such cases *you* will be the eyes of our project, and we thank you for your help if such a case happens.

And another thing…

I have been whittling away at the number of project members with invalid email addresses. At this moment there are 10 project members with invalid email addresses. The simplest explanation for this is that the project member changed service providers and forgot to log in and update their email address on their accounts page. This means that any match notification emails (and this message) will no longer reach these project members. However, there is also another explanation why the email address is no longer valid. I determined that one project member has passed away. This is sad enough on its own, but it is made even sadder because this deceased project member’s kit has recently had their first match. Unfortunately, this project member did not assign a beneficiary for their Kit (on the Account settings page) so we have noone to contact about the match.

I know we don’t like to think about such things, but we really should take some time to make sure that the hard work we’ve put into our research doesn’t get lost in Digital Limbo because we didn’t have someone who would take over our kit for us after we’ve passed on.  I myself had a hard time struggling with this, in part because only a couple members of my family are interested in genealogy and even fewer are interested in DNA. But I did finally convince someone to be my DNA Beneficiary and I have prepared copies of kit numbers and passwords for them if my time should come upon me suddenly and I have not made other plans.

Sooooo, that should give you all something to think about until my next posting, which should be sometime around early summer.  Remember, DNA Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are all coming our way. Start saving that spare change and keep an eye out for sales on DNA upgrades from FT-DNA!

Until next time, I hope you all have a great spring!

-geo

George F. Locke

Co-Admin. for the Locke Surname project at FT-DNA

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December, 2013
Hello there! As we prepare ourselves for the coming year end festivities and parties, I wanted to take a couple minutes of your time to share some facts about activity in our Y-DNA project for this past year.

2013 was a busy year for the project.  We’ve had new members join, existing members upgrade their tests, new Family subgroups created and we are ‘oh-so-close’ to having our 100th Lock or Locke participate take the Y-DNA test.  Here are a few numbers culled from the project databases:

There are a total of 102 members in our project.Of that number, 96 are participants in the Y-DNA test and 6 are affiliated with Lock or Locke families who have participated in Mt-DNA tests and/or Family Finder tests. For the Y-DNA tests, the numbers breakdown as follow:
96 - Total number of men participating in the Lock/ Locke Y-DNA test (12 markers minimum or more).
72 - Total of the above Y-DNA tests that have tested up to 25 Markers or more (75%)
63 - Total of the above Y-DNA tests that have tested up to 37 Markers or more (66%)
36 - Total of the above Y-DNA tests that have tested up to 67 Markers or more (38%)
  3 - Total of the above Y-DNA tests that have tested up to 111 Markers (the maximum test level) (3%)

This past year our project gained 13 new members who ordered Y-DNA test kits and two (2) new members who are affiliated with Lock/ Locke families who ordered Mt-DNA test kits and/or Family Finder test kits.

In addition to new test kit orders, there was also a lot of activity involving upgrades to existing test kits (22 test kit upgrades in all!). These numbers break down as follows:
4 – Total number of SNP upgrades to existing kits
6 – Total number of Y-DNA marker upgrades to existing kits
4 – Total number of Family Finder upgrades to existing kits
4 – Total number of Mt-DNA upgrades to existing kits
2 – Total number of Haplo-Backbone upgrades to existing kits
2 – Total number of GenoGraphic Conversion upgrades to existing kits

And last but not least we created two (2) new family subgroups (14 total family subgroups now) as well as re-distributed the unmatched tests into subgroups sorted by Haplogroup to make it easier to compare those results against similar test kits.

I can’t swear to it, but my instinct tells me that the continuing sales promotions offered by Family Tree DNA have contributed greatly to the number new orders and upgrades that we have seen this year.  Remember that FT-DNA’s current sale is going on now and will continue through midnight December 31, 2013. If you’ve thought about upgrading your existing test kit from 12, 25 or 37 markers, now may be the perfect time to do just that.  To see what your upgrade prices would be, just visit your personal project page and click on the “Upgrade” button in the upper right corner. There you will find a drop-down list of test upgrades and their prices that are available for your unique test kit.  Remember that if you initially tested at 12 or 25 markers and did not receive any matches, you may want to consider upgrading you test to the next higher level. A 12 marker test that is an11/12 mismatch *might* actually turn out to be a 24/25 possible match at the 25marker level. It has happened before.

In closing I would like to thank you all for your continued support of our Y-DNA project and I would like to wish you all the very best of the season and I hope that you may all find new family connections in 2014.

Sincerely,
-geo
George F. Locke
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Co-Administrator of the Locke & Locke Y-DNA Project
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July, 2013

If you are a participant in the LOCK & LOCKE DNA project and it's been a while since you last logged into your account, please take a moment to do so and verify that your registered email address is correct. I sent out an email introducing myself to project members a while back and received many returned emails because of inactive email addresses. At last count there were two (2) members with no registered email address, and nine (9) members with inactive email addresses. There are also six (6) members with multiple registered email addresses of which one of them is inactive.

Please know that I despise junk email as much as anybody and I will not be flooding your inbox with digital garbage. However, there are times when legitimate communications are necessary such as recently occurred with the notice of a family reunion for one of the Family Sub-Groups. Please also note that if your registered email is inactive, or you have not registered an email address, then you will *not* receive notices from Family Tree DNA when there are matches to your test kit.

There’s two quick ways to tell if you need to check your registered email address on your account page at Family Tree DNA.  First ask yourself, have you changed your email address since you joined the project? If the answer to this is either “yes” or “I don’t know”, then I’d suggest logging onto your personal account page and verify that your email address is shown correctly. Second, if you can’t remember when you last received a notice from FT-DNA regarding a match with your kit, then again, I would suggest that you log onto your personal account page and verify that your email address is shown correctly.

Again, I promise you that I (we) will not be filling your in-boxes with digital garbage.

Yours truly,

-geo

George F. Locke

Co-Admin for the Lock & Locke Y-DNA Project.

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June 2013:
Good News! With the latest member joining, we are now just one member away from reaching 100 members! Project membership has been making steady gains since its inception in 2004!
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May 2013:
Our project was formed in September of 2004. Since then it has taken us almost 9 years to reach the 100 member mark.  In that time frame, we have uncovered 13 unique Locke Lineages. Our thirteenth family group was just revealed the week of May 25th, 2013. With your help we can finally push beyond that number and reveal more family groups.
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