Why Should you Participate?

Why Should you Participate?

You don't have to be a male Cooper descendant to participate. Women who have an interest in their Cooper family history who know of a male Cooper descendant can participate by encouraging those Cooper's to submit samples for testing.  This may take research of previous generations to identify brothers of your father, grandfather, great-grandfather, etc. and then tracing their lineage down to a living male Cooper.

If your Cooper family line has not been submitted to the Cooper Surname DNA Project and received a lineage number, we encourage you to do so. For information about how to submit the DNA sample of your Cooper-line, go to the Participate page.  Even if only two or three generations are known to you, I urge you to submit a DNA sample. Unbelievably, we have several one-name Cooper-lines in our Cooper Group.

It is important to understand that not all male Cooper descendants need be tested. Generally, only one or two samples from a Cooper-line are sufficient to determine linkage with other Cooper-lines. With larger family groups, additional samples might be needed. The point is that for this project to provide useful results, representative sampling rather than complete testing is sufficient.
 

What are your expectations?  DNA testing will cause disappointment and frustration to people who have excessive expectations such as discovering legendary American heroes, English royalty or a certain ethnicity in their ancestry.  Keep in mind, your own genealogical research should not be directed at confirming a specific pre-determined notion or discovery of someone with whom you would like to be descended from, but rather direct it towards finding whomever and whatever you can, and be grateful for all of it you can find, and never be disappointed.

It is also important to understand what DNA testing will and will not tell us. If enough people submit test samples to this project, we should begin to see previously unknown linkages between and among Cooper-lines. The test results will not tell us what those relationships are, only that some ancestral relationship probably exists. The different Cooper-lines can then communicate with one another to share information and help fill in the blanks. There is a lot of important information about the Cooper's which has been uncovered. However, much of it is scattered among many researchers. When this information is combined and compared in a meaningful way, real progress in documenting family histories can be made.

You do not have to be an experienced genealogist to participate. Most of us work on our family histories in our spare time as a hobby. We are all researchers, not in the sense of being experienced professionals, but because we seek information about our past. This is good.

So, what are the benefits of participation? Here are a few.

    ●    Break through the brick walls. In some cases DNA test results provide the independent information needed to bolster or deny a questionable ancestral story. We have already had a case of two men discovering by their test results that they are rather closely related prompting them to re-examine the genealogies they have been working on for many years. They found the unnoticed connection. These two men believed they had ancestral linkage but had no proof.

    ●    Determine ancestral origin. Many Cooper's have wondered about the origins of the Cooper surname. Did all of the various spellings originate from a single Cooper ancestor long ago? Alternatively, are today's various Cooper families descended from different, unrelated ancestors who acquired their surnames from their occupations, geographic locations, or other means? Comparing DNA test results from enough Cooper's offers the possibility of adding new information which might help answer these questions.

    ●    Define and clarify the entire Cooper ancestry more fully. The Cooper Surname Project was started to allow Cooper researchers to pool their information and benefit from cooperation. Many different lineages have been defined, but they have not been reliably joined by documentary research. The Cooper DNA Project is a new type of cooperative effort, which holds great promise for all of us. A Cooper Y-chromosome database is being built. As it grows, it will become possible to point to relationships not previously suspected. We expect that within each of the Cooper Surname Project lineages, the men will have very similar test results. Where they do not, it is desirable to look for clues to where the change occurred. In most cases, there is not much need for new data on known relatives of those already in the database. The main need is for diversity, such as lineages not yet tested, Cooper's living in different places, and those with spellings of the name which are possibly not in the Cooper/Couper/Cowper/Cuper family.

    ●    Prove and disprove familial relationships.  Keep in mind a major aspect of DNA testing, it can prove and disprove familial relationships, which could very well save you time in misdirected research and finances.

    ●    Posterity. One major problem many Y-chromosome researchers in the Cooper Surname Reconstruction Project have run into is Cooper-lines that daughter-out. In these cases researchers find themselves in a dilemma, wondering what to do next.  I strongly encourage and it is incumbent on male Cooper's who are the last in their Cooper-lines to share their DNA sample so as to leave a history of their Cooper-lines for their descendants.

   ●    Sharing with other Cooper-lines.  DNA analysis is a tool in research which allows numerous Cooper-lines to come together in a unified force to collectively help each other in their individual research.  Participation in the Cooper Surname Reconstruction Project furthers this effort and acts as a platform to summarize this collective effort.

As explained in the background discussion in this website, there is nothing in the Y-chromosome test results of this project which could be considered personally revealing or identifying. Still, the confidentiality of each participant is important.  Therefore, only the kit number and lineage numbers of each person submitting a sample are disclosed in the results tables.  And, only Family Tree DNA and the Project's group administrator know the identity of those people . Naturally, for exact matches, to further discussion, research and the sharing of information, email addresses and identification will be made known to those with a need to know. Otherwise, such information will not be made available without the permission of the participant, with emphasis on the latter.  It is the precept of the writer that the sharing of alleles and written historical documentation of family histories is the essence of genealogy research in the furtherance of learning the who, what, when where, why and how.
 

Finally, participants should be aware of the occurrence of "non-paternity" events in family histories where the male off-spring is not the biological descendent of his surnamed father. Such circumstances could be attributed to a death in the family, adoption, infidelity, rape, etc. Though not necessarily common, such circumstances do occur in every family history, and can offer one explanation for a divergence in DNA test results. However, there are other explanations for such a divergence, so caution is advised before jumping to a conclusion that a "non-paternity" event occurred.