So I got curious about what happened to the other six brothers and their father. I soon discovered that an earlier member of my family, although not an ancestor, one Albert Welles, wrote a book "History of the Welles Family In England and Normandy" which was published in 1876. It was he who claimed that these seven men he listed were brothers and their father to have been Nathaniel Wells.
While this book has a lot of incorrect information, he also printed material shared with him by many Wells descendants of different Wells/Welles families of the era that contain valuable information.
I started to suspect this information on these seven brothers early in my digging into research material and began reaching out to other Wells researchers. It wasn't until 2002 when we first started to see the DNA results that my suspicions were finally confirmed. No two of those seven "brothers" were even related.
Over the past 40 years I have personally gathered a lot of material but SO much more was sent to me by other researchers. I recently estimated that I have at least 100,000 pages of Wells information for the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK as well as from several other countries where Wells families found themselves. Possibly much more than that.
In addition I have tens of thousands of emails I received since Internet Email became a thing. These date back to the time I used Compuserve and then BigFoot before moving on to our own domain about 1992. Pulling up the Compuserve and Bigfoot email content will be an interesting challenge.
That Special Collection will be an on-line resource available to everyone who has an interest in Wells families. As the data is digitized and sent off to Allen County it will also be made available to you folks. Probably through the Wells.org website. And it will also include anything that other Wells researchers are willing to contribute to the effort.
During the project I am hoping that many other researchers will be willing to share their material as well. I know each of them has likely spent endless hours in libraries, county offices, and other archives pouring though local histories and using other resources.
If each researcher has only a ream of paper (500 sheets) that means collectively they probably have over 250,000 sheets of information.
I have not asked for volunteers yet, but 14 researchers have already stepped forward to offer. I WILL be asking for volunteers, just not yet.
What I hope you can do
I hope that those of you who are willing and able will assist me in this huge endeavor. The first I hope you will do is focus on your own family to complete as much as you can of your family tree in a genealogical program whether it is Family Tree Maker, another genealogical program or on some website such as Ancestry or MyHeritage. Our end objective here will be to merge the information for each family from the cousins who are working the family. Here I will call for someone in each of the families to serve as the leader/coordinator of that family. Please consider whether you want to take on the mantle for your own Wells family. Some will be rather small because they sometimes are almost dead-ends and those of you with such families may well be the only known researcher. Others have thousands of individuals in their tree and dozens of researchers available to assist.
We will also be seeking more participants in the DNA testing as we still have a lot of holes. We will be encouraging some of those who have been tested to upgrade their Y-DNA tests to look for mutations and other bits that may help us narrow down the specific branches of some trees. For example. Family W015 Thomas Wells & Alice Tomes we now believe may have been just one branch of that family to have immigrated. Thomas Welles son of an Edmond Welles who settled in Tolland County, CT; Stephen Wells who settled in Richmond, VA as well as a suspected 4th branch all came and hopefully will show some unique mutations to help us differentiate the branches.
We know another family W006 - Thomas Wells & Frances ___ are either the progenitors of two additional branches OR there may have been one or more additional immigrant ancestor from this same family. Notice the frequent use of Thomas among the ancestors in the 1600's? THAT is another problem for many of us.
The bottom line here on the DNA is if your DNA shows a connection to one of the baseline families and you have been unable to find the genealogical connection it may be that you are descended from another early member of this family.
When you are working on your personal family trees, please be especially diligent about including source documentation. Don't make someone later have to track down again what you have already found.
The gedcom request will come later.
More as we progress.
Phase I We now have over 550 researchers on our WellsResearch list. I am still working on confirming email addresses for those I can located who are part of the DNA project. I anticipate eventually we will have 700+ as I wind down on trying to catch up with everyone I know about and we all start inviting other researchers to join us as we move along.
Phase II Trying to contact past DNA participants continues. I believe we had nearly 600 who had been tested before we moved the project to Family Tree DNA in 2014. Only 120 were moved into FTDNA. There is some good news on that front. The next update at FTDNA will restore the ability to see the STR Results for folks who transferred 46 markers over to FTDNA. I will let you know and tell you how to see this when it is live.
Phase III While I have downloaded all the FTDNA Y-DNA test results, I have not yet had time to import them into my matching software. This is important because FTDNA does not offer the ability to match imported 46 marker test results to those who have been tested at FTDNA and vice versa.
Hopefully that will happen this next month as I can find time to add the import feature to my program. Then I will be able to search the entire range of Y-DNA test resuts for matches.
Phase IV Contacting other researchers from my database. This will be a painfully slow process as so many are no longer reachable at email or phone numbers I have. I will add to this a group of people who contacted me over the past 10 years as I can verify their contact information and invite them to join us.
Phase V I am slowly working my way through the Wells.org website.
There will be two new sections on Wells.org. The first is the Wells-uk.org that Dr John Wells in the UK once operated. He has passed most of the pages that he could find on to me and I will try to extract the rest from the Wayback Machine. Yes, it can be done.
The second section is the Wells DNA Surname Study Merge Database that Bonnie/Bonita Hillmer had created and was pretty much lost when Ancestry started limiting the content on Rootsweb.com. Bonita has transferred all the pages from that website over to me and I will be working my way through the lot to make sure that all the internal links are operational. If you have not seen this before, she trimmed the many gedcom files of men who had been DNA tested so that only the Wells and their spouses are included. There is a nice index that helps find specific Wells ancestors (men and women) and includes source citations specifically census records.
I will advise you all when these two sections are functional again.
Retutn to the Project 26 Index
Last revised 3/24/2026