Hi All, I’d like to bring to your attention an article in the July 2022 issue of Mennonite Family History:  “A y-DNA Study of Anabaptist Meyer Families in Eighteenth Century Pennsylvania” Gina Meyers and Eric Myers. In this article we collect Swiss Anabaptist Meyer family documentation from existing literature and our own research, and compare it to y-DNA test results from descendants of those families.  A review of 22 immigrant lines shows that only 10 have identifiable y-DNA test results, and that the commonly accepted associations of these immigrants to families in 16th and 17th century Switzerland must be considered suspect.  In particular, the famous Meyer "family" of Baschi Meyer and Tylli Mueller consists of immigrants from at least 3 different y-DNA haplogroups, and is thus clearly in error.  We call for descendants of untested lines to help answer some questions by submitting y-DNA tests.  We also suggest that other Swiss Anabaptist families are likely to be misassociated in the same way, and would benefit from this same methodology. I’ve been working on this with Gina Meyers, an admin of the FTDNA Myers surname project.  We started off investigating whether published genealogies of my Meyer family (such as A.J. Fretz’s “Meyer Family History” originally published in 1896) could be corroborated with y-DNA data.  It turns out the answer is “yes” for the family of Christian Meyer (1708-1779).  We have descendants from three of Christians sons (Christian, Andreas, Henry) who have good documentation and are also close y-DNA matches to each other.  We have not found any claim of descent with reasonable documentation and a non-matching yDNA test. (Actually, I don’t think we’ve found any claims that disagree with Fretz *for this specific family* that are supported with actual documentation.)  We also have a yDNA match who appears to tie into Christian’s line several generations earlier.  The documentation is not as solid for this match, but the fact of a yDNA match does lend some strength to it. We then continued to dig into the other known Swiss Anabaptist Meyer families as well, including their deeper history back to Switzerland (per Richard Warren Davis, Jane Evans Best, etc).  Here the y-DNA results tell a very different story, and it is clear that at least some of the pre-immigrant family associations are problematic.  To be fair, published authors have often been clearer where they feel there is uncertainty than those who cite them have been.  Gina’s and my approach in the article was to focus on the immigrant generation and their descendants, where the documentation is generally better and more accessible than it is for previous generations in Switzerland and Palatinate.  This approach let us combine the strengths of DNA testing and good documentation to identify who is or isn’t related to who, and avoid as much speculation as possible.  We hope that at some point in the future, researchers who are more familiar with European documentation sources will be able to build on the DNA based family groupings and reassess the pre-immigrant ancestries. Cheers, Eric Myers