CLOSE surname Y-DNA news

I've been reviewing the CLOSE Y-DNA project at Family Tree DNA and am pleased to report that in the last few days two people have contacted me with a view to taking a test and joining the project.  One wishes to confirm a possible Swaledale connection - for which we already have six completed tests.  The other person's ancestry can be traced back to Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire - for which we have no other known participants at the moment, although we have several CLOSEs in the USA who may have as yet unconfirmed English ancestry.

In addition to those two English 'hotspots', there have been CLOSE families in and around Baltonsborough, Somerset and Collyweston, Northamptonshire, for at least 400 years.  There are a number of other areas in the UK where the CLOSE or CLOSS surname can be traced back several hundred years: Ipswich, Suffolk, Llanberis, N Wales (both appear to have changed from CLOSE to CLOSS), Leeds, Bradford, Hull, Yorkshire, Grantham, Lincolnshire, and most of County Durham, for example. 

We have a small number of participants with Irish origins - the surname seems to vary between CLOSS and CLOSE - but we do need more samples for comparison.  

The Fairfield, Connecticut CLOSEs have proved links to Swaledale, Yorkshire through the DNA tests in our project.  However, we would like to see test results from other CLOSE or CLOSS individuals in the USA and indeed elsewhere, since we have quite a number of participants whose results don't have any other 'close' matches at the moment.

Other variants are also of interest: at the moment we have participants named CLOUS, CLOUSE and KLOSE.

If you, or someone you know, is a male CLOSE (or a variant surname) who may be descended from one of these families, please encourage them to take a test and join the project.

By the way - this isn't an exclusive club:  if you are female, or if your surname isn't CLOSE (or a variant) but you have an interest in the surname, you can still join the project.  You may have useful information to help us add pieces to the jigsaw; you may know of a distant CLOSE cousin whom you could encourage to take a test.

For full contact details of my CLOSE one-name study, visit the Guild of One-Name Studies and put CLOSE into the surname search box (top right).



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