Exciting News: "Donor Conceived Project" at FTDNA!!!

I am very very excited to announce that my application for the creation of a special project for donor-conceived adults, former and current donors, and recipient parents on behalf of their underage donor-conceived children, was accepted this week by FamilyTree DNA!!!

Family Tree DNA Projects - list of current surname and geographic projects in the FTDNA database for Y-STR, mtDNA, and Family Finder tests.

UPDATE [4/10/2011]:
Here is the new website for the Donor Conceived DNA Project at Family Tree DNA - for donor-conceived individuals and former and current donors, Y-STR test and Family Finder test accepted.

Yours truly (me) will be the primary group administrator, and in the future I hope to add several other admins to assist me.

In the coming weeks I will be creating a public website for our project and I invite anyone who has submitted their DNA to FTDNA (Y-STR test or Family Finder test) to join this project.

The main goals of the project will be as follows:

1) A central location for donor-conceived individuals to locate half-siblings
2) A central location for former and current donors to locate their biological children

I have in the past advised donor-conceived adults to have their mother's tested if they are looking to trace their biological father using the Family Finder test, however for offspring who are more interested or concerned with finding siblings (especially pre-donor number era offspring), or for whatever reason cannot have mom tested, this is a great alternative.

Compared to traditional siblingship tests which for the most conclusive results require both mother's to be tested, or tests like CaBRI that require females to have mom and another female maternal relative tested, this test only needs your DNA.

This project will also be able to identify donors who's sperm was sold to other banks/clinics, sold overseas, or even in instances where the doctor himself was the donor (or the doctor recruited his/her family members to be donors).  Especially in the past secretive era of donor conception, I strongly believe many donors from private clinics were related and perhaps many donor conceived people are actually cousins with one another!  This project will examine the ancestral makeup of donor-conceived people (is it really true that a significant number of donors were/are Jewish doctors or is that an "old wives tale"? -- this project could perhaps shed some light on that assumption).


WOAH!!!!

And an even bigger update....my FF results were just posted!  Over a month early!!  A suggested paternal 2nd cousin and about a dozen suggested paternal 3rd and 4th cousins!  I am still digesting the information, but I will update ASAP.