Joan had asked on another thread about whether anyone was using autosomal DNA results for McConnell families in an organized way. Autosomal results are not the same as the Y chromosome results that we often use from men whose strictly paternal line is of interest to us. Some people, like Joan in this case, do not have males from their line of interest who could be tested. Others, like me, have had males from their families tested, but those males do not have matches whose genealogies can help us answer our questions about our McConnell lineages. So we use autosomal DNA results for descendants of those lineages in hopes of finding previously unknown cousins with helpful genealogies. It would make sense for someone to do what Joan has asked about, which is to work with autosomal DNA results for people with ancestors with the McConnell surname.

I do not know of anyone doing this in a comprehensive way. Doug McDonald handles most of the data issues for the Clan Donald DNA Project, and I know that accepts as members McConnell descendants with autosomal DNA results from Family Tree DNA, i.e. Family Finder results, but I don't know how active he has been with the use of these results. The project is very large, and I think that comparing Y DNA results alone is consuming all or nearly all of the time that he devotes to the project. So....

Does anyone else know of anyone working with autosomal DNA results for McConnell descendants? Maybe it is time for some of us to start working on that. Joan, at the very least I think that you and I will want to compare our autosomal DNA results. I have access to Family Finder results for 6 descendants of my earliest known McConnell ancestors, but none of those results have been uploaded to Gedmatch. I know that at least one of my McConnell cousins would be willing to have me upload his results to Gedmatch. We could also work with David Pike's utilities to compare our results. Let's hope that someone out there is or soon will be working on collecting autosomal DNA data for McConnell researchers who want to figure out their relationships.