BURGESS SURNAME DNA PROJECT

Introduction

Launched in August 2004 by Michael Roy Burgess, the Burgess DNA project had as its original goal to answer the question on how the major Burgess families in the United States are related, and where in the UK these lines originally derived. Today with members in England, Scotland, Canada and Australia, the project has expanded to become a one name study of the Burgess surname.

What we are trying to do

The goal of the Project is to identify unique Y-chromosome signatures for each of the major Burgess families in the world. The Burgess surname is very common and is ranked in the top 200 of names in the United Kingdom. The United States currently has the largest number of people with the surname followed by the UK. Roughly 50-100 apparently unrelated Burgess lines were recorded in North America prior to 1800, scattered up and down the Atlantic coastline. None of these families can be linked through conventional research to a specific European ancestor or place of origin, although most undoubtedly derived from the British Isles. These families account for 95% or more of all individuals named Burgess living in the United States today, the remaining having come from later immigrations.

In the UK the name is everywhere today but earlier census records indicate a large cluster spanning Cheshire and Lancashire. Early rural parish records indicate several clusters of families named Burgess located in different British counties. These may each represent unique creations of the name. Most of our families probably trace back to one of these sixteenth-century Burgess groups.

The power of Y-DNA testing is that it can reach back thousands of years and determine how closely two people are related relative to others. As test results have accumulated, a number of these Burgess lines have affiliated with each other in ways that could not have been predicted or proved through conventional genealogical research; some of these connections occurred prior to colonial times.