DNA project to link people who share the same Staffordshire…

Society chairman Ian Bloor looks through a family tree.

FAMILY historians are appealing for volunteers to join a DNA project aimed at linking the genealogical trees of people who share the same Staffordshire surname.

The Blo(o)r(e) Society has already arranged for 27 men to be tested to see if their genetic signatures are a match. It has discovered at least three of them are related.

Now society members hope more people linked to the various spellings of the Bloor name will undergo the simple swab test to shed further light on hundreds of years of history.

Chairman Ian Bloor said: "We have 106 separate trees at the moment. But if we can get the DNA samples, we might be able to go down to 18 or 20 trees.

"There are people who may have no idea they are related. It's a tremendously useful way of digging further back."

The family trees covered by the initial DNA work have connections to Newcastle, Keele, Burslem, Trentham, Ipstones and Nantwich.

Ian, who lives in Audlem, was the first to have his genetic make-up mapped, although he has yet to find a match. The results were sent off to a specialist company in the U.S. for analysis.

It is the latest project to grow out of the work of the one-name study group, which Ian and his wife Celia founded two decades ago.

There are now 140 regular members from as far afield as North America and Australia. But many are based in North Staffordshire, where the surname is thought to have originated.

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DNA project to link people who share the same Staffordshire...