GEN • GEN: Michael Cooley's Genetic Genealogy Blog
[ ARTICLES ]
12 May 2016
About Michael Cooley
Genealogy has been one of my hobbies since 1977. Although I've never
worked as a professional genealogist, I published The Pettit Correspondent, The National Queries Forum, and premiered one of the early
non-.edu genealogy websites, Genealogy Online (genealogy.org),
in 1994. It was purchased in 2000 by RootsWeb and, from them, Ancestry.com.
My personal genealogy website is ancestraldata.com.
The news about the mitochondrial DNA extraction from Ötzi the Iceman
in about 1990 was an eye opener. A few years later I read about the Y-DNA
research on the Cohens and what is now referred to as Y-chromosomal
Aaron and recognized the potential of DNA for genealogical research.
It wasn't until 2006, however, that I discovered that DNA testing had become
affordable. I now maintain or help maintain twenty surname DNA projects at
Family Tree DNA,
including the Cooley DNA
Project and three projects at Facebook.com: The Worldwide Cooley YDNA
Project, the Pettit-Mellowes Y-DNA
Project, and the R1a-YP4248 Subclade
Project.
I started this blog with a collection of catchup emails written to Cooley
project members during the spring of 2016. Cooley is frequently the topic
in these articles but this site is not intended to be specifically for (or
about) any one surname. Included are studies of other names. (Akins,
Duncan, Whitfield, Cochran, and Strother, for example). Although the
articles are specific to the topic at hand, the techniques and methods of
analyzing the data, which I discuss, are ubiquitous. It's my hope that
anyone interested in genetic genealogy will find some use among these
pages.
I have given presentations and seminars in
genealogy, genetic genealogy, history, and film for the Osher Lifelong Learning
Institute (OLLI) at Humboldt State University and have given
presentations about genetic genealogy in Oregon, Washington, D.C., Salt Lake
City, and at various venues in Humboldt County, California, and Santa Rosa,
California, where I now reside. Returning to school late in life, I
graduated with a degree in history at HSU in 2013 and received an MA in
English (creative nonfiction writing) through Southern New Hampshire
University in December 2017.
Other interests compete for my attention, of course. See my personal
website at newsummer.com for more
information.