Posted July 2, 2026 by Orin Wells

Previous updates are available.

I placed the previous updates for March through June on the Wells.org website here:

Project Status

https://wells.org/project26/project26.html

Proof of Concept

I am still struggling to identify a Wells family to use for the example/sample Wells family to be built out and sent as the first  contribution to the Allan County Public Library to start the Wells Families History Special Collection.  It needs to be a family  where someone has had Y-DNA testing done that did not match anyone else named Wells.  It needs to be a Wells family that can be traced back 4 to 5 generations where it hits the infamous brick wall.  BUT one where researchers are pretty certain  they known how the Wells surname was adopted from some other prior surname and that surname can be identified and, ideally, one or more descendants from that family have been tested and match the dna of the Wells subject.

I am open to ANY suggestions on this.

I want to use a family that does not exactly match any of our Baseline families.

Family Leaders Needed for MOST of the Wells Families

Again, I have heard from a few more volunteers to take on the lead for their families.  But it is less than 20 at this point.   I need more of you to step up and offer to be the clearing point for all things pertaining to the family histories for all the other families.  If you are willing, please send me an email.  This can be a "baseline" Wells family as I have previously defined or a branch Wells family where researchers have not been able to extend the family to an earlier point in time reaching the 1500s or 1600s.

Please check this set of pages to see what Baseline and Branch families I have identified earlier - we will add more as they are defined.  I am open to suggestions for additions.  Some of the Branch families will eventually be swept up into their ancestral Baseline families.

https://www.wells.org/dnaproje/dnaproje.html

Click on Baseline and Branch Families by family ID

A.I.?

Still open to anyone either working with an AI platform for genealogical research or willing to get your feet wet.   I have done some testing using Google's Gemini and Perplexity but have not reached any conclusion at this point.   Ancestry, Familysearch and MyHeritage appear to be using AI in some manner, but it isn't clear to me exactly how.   One of our subscribers has been working with Claude from Anthropic with some success. Another recently took a course on using A.I. for genealogy. Anxious to see what she learned.

Roots Web Mailing Lists

No progress on this yet.

File Organization

Bible Records

I found still more bible records while indexing.  As I indicated earlier I will get into them later and start processing them plus putting them on the website. ====================================================

Project 26 Status Update

Adding researchers to our list is still on the back burner.

Phase II

Contacting past DNA participants is still on the back burner.   

Phase III

The task to import all the FTDNA Y-Test results into my database is almost ready.  Right now I am editing the exported FTDNA results so that the assigned family codes are included.  Codes such as W001, W999 etc.  This has turned into a larger effort than I expected.  As I examine each participant I find myself trying to dig into their ancestry to do the best I can to assign them to one of the Families.  There are more than I had realized who do not match anyone else so they will be specially coded in the final product.  I hope to have everything finished in July on this task.

Phase IV

Contacting other Wells researchers from my Researcher database is also on the back burner.

Phase V

The task to clean up the Wells.org website still  continues to slowly make progress.

Orin Wells
253-630-5296

Last revised 9/1/2026