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McNamara

  • 158 members
Administrators
  • Paddy Waldron

$300.00

General Fund Total
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About us

Welcome to the home page of the McNamara surname DNA project.
SURNAME HISTORY
The Irish surname McNamara, or in Irish Mac Conmara (son of the hound of the sea), is, according to MacLysaght, that of the most important of the Dalcassian septs after the O'Briens, to whom they were marshals. It is most common in County Clare, but also numerous throughout North Munster and in all parts of Ireland.
In its County Clare homeland, Mack is often used to represent McNamara in speech, but the full name is normally retained for formal and legal purposes. Nevertheless, Mack is sometimes found in written records, especially among the diaspora.
The 1911 census of Ireland included 6,645 McNamaras, about a third of them (2,228) born in County Clare.
A brief history of the surname can be found on the Clare County Library website.
The most extensive history of the surname is probably The Story of an Irish Sept by Nottidge Charles Macnamara, first published in 1896 and reprinted in 1999 under the title The Origin and History of the MacNamaras. More details of the book and an order form can be found here.
PROJECT ADMINISTRATORS
This project (as McNamarra, a rare spelling variant) was originally hosted by WorldFamilies.net, which closed down in May 2018.
As of 23 May 2018, the project administrator is genetic genealogist Paddy Waldron (grandson of a McNamara). Paddy Waldron's personal website has some additional reading on genetic genealogy, such as How to get the most out of your DNA results and Interpreting Y-DNA results.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE
  1. If you are not already a project member and you have any ancestor with the surname McNamara (or a variant spelling), then please JOIN the project by clicking on the JOIN button to the right of the castle in the banner photograph above. However, if you are not yet an FTDNA customer but have submitted a DNA sample to one of the other DNA companies, then you may be able to copy your data to FamilyTreeDNA.com via the free Autosomal Transfer and should do this before joining any projects.
  2. One of the principal reasons that male FTDNA customers participate in projects is for guidance on their place on the Y-DNA Haplotree. If you allow project administrators to view your Y-STR match lists, then they will often be able to predict with considerable confidence a more recent place for you on the haplotree than the automated predicted haplogroup given by FTDNA. You will then be assigned by the administrator to the relevant subgroup on the Y-DNA Colorized Chart in the DNA Results area of the project website.
  3. As of May 2018, in order to achieve the full benefits of project membership, you must take action to give the project administrators "Limited" or "Advanced" access to your kit. This can be done when you join or can be done later by clicking here. For each project that you have joined, click the pencil icon, scroll down and change "Minimum" to "Limited" or "Advanced" as necessary, then click "Accept Project Preferences" and then click "Confirm".
  4. In order that you and the other members can benefit from your membership of the project, it is imperative that you squeeze in names, dates and places to the 50 characters allowed for both your Direct Maternal (i.e. matrilineal) and Direct Paternal (i.e. patrilineal) Most Distant (i.e. most distant known) Ancestors under the Earliest Known Ancestors tab here in order to help those looking for mitochondrial DNA matches and Y-DNA matches respectively; and that you also upload a GEDCOM file here showing your direct ancestors (which should automatically populate your surname list, although this was not working around 2019-2020).
  5. If you are a male McNamara, and especially if your most distant known male line ancestor is not yet represented on the McNamara surname DNA project Y-DNA Colorized Chart, then please order whatever level of Y-DNA analysis your budget allows, preferably Big Y-700. Project administrators are generally willing to arrange further discounts on the Big Y-700 sale price.
  6. If you are a female, then please also recruit a male McNamara descended from your most distant known male line ancestor to the project.
  7. If your McNamara lineage is already represented in the project or if it has "daughtered out", then you can donate to the project here to fund more advanced Y-DNA analysis of existing DNA samples. These donations can be used only to purchase DNA analysis from FTDNA. This project also appears as McNamara on the dropdown menu on the Group General Fund Contribution page.
  8. If you want to see which of your Family Finder matches are in this project (or in any project that you have joined), then just go to the Advanced Matches page, login if necessary and tick the Family Finder checkbox, select the project in the "Show Matches For" dropdown and click the RUN REPORT button. Finally, click the Family Finder column heading to sort the matches by closeness of estimated relationship.
  9. If you have received Big Y-700 (or Big Y-500 or Big Y) results and belong to either of the main branches of haplogroup R (R-P312 or R-U106), then please copy your results to The Big Tree by following these instructions and uploading here.
  10. For a discussion of the latest results, see here.
  11. Please feel free to use the Activity Feed to direct any questions that you may have to the project administrators and for discussion with other project members.
  12. Please note that FTDNA feels obliged by GDPR to expose the email address of the project administrator on this page to every spammer in the world, hence it is merely a "noreply" address, like FTDNA's own email addresses on its own website.

Last updated 14 June 2023.