Additional DNA information by Terry Foster is posted here.  Be sure to assist Terry understand what it all means!

General comments by Gary Foster to a Group 7 member in an e-mail on 23 June 2008. Gary said, "Let’s talk about the DNA process as we understand it today.  A few years ago science began to observe that every cell in a person’s body whether or not it was observed to be a cell from skin, blood, hair or simply the soft tissue inside our mouth from our cheeks contained a blue print of our creation. 

So far more is found than we currently understand.  But criminal science found a use for proving if a person was at a crime scene or not by finding just a drop of blood, skin sample, hair or seimen and comparing it to the same found on the accused.  You see there is in every cell a blue print more perfectly identifiable than a fingerprint or the pattern found in the iris of one’s eyes.  So, when the Judge sends you on a long tax payer paid vacation out of circulation from the public it is because a match of DNA has been never found to be at fault.  If your blood is found at the death scene then you were definitely there. 

For genealogists another remarkable thing has been observed on the “Y” Chromosome  only found in males.  It is that a father passes onto his son an identical match as he received from his own father.  Perhaps God knew he had to assist men in keeping track of who fathered whom, so he placed a marker in each cell of their bodies.  So far a test is performed on the “markers” identified on the male Y Chromosome in tests of 12, 25, 37 and 67 specifically characteristics.  The more markers a man pays for of his DNA sample the more perfectly he is identified as to coming from his father, grandfather, great grandfather, and clear back for a thousand years or so.

Most Foster males today appear to come from the Forster families of Northumberland in England since 1066 when at the Battle of Hastings William the Conqueror defeated the Saxon King and rewarded his Normans the management of all the territories all over England. His wife’s brother was named Richard De Forestier and at the age of 16 he was knighted and given Normandy as his inheritance.  Over the centuries that followed the name Forester and Forster and eventually Foster all descend from the beginning families.   Castles were built and Norman authority prevailed and even the French language was spoken in England for the next 400 to 500 years.  Eventually the English language prevailed but was made up of a little German, Scandinavian, even Roman influence because of all the various invaders who came to England and remained.  Some took on the Foster name but clearly weren’t the same blue bloods that came here from Normandy, France.   Now some interesting things have entered into the science of understanding. Some men named Foster have slightly different DNA patterns so are grouped into different sections of name of Foster.

The designation called Group 7 refers to those Foster males who only have a few markers different from each other.  In other words they descend from the same male lineage and are related to each other within the past few generations to as far back as say 500 years.  With the paper trail to show how each of us are related “we” can find our most common relative, that great grandfather who gave us his sample of DNA.

Those Foster men in differently assigned groups of which there are about 200 that have been tested right now may also relate to us if you go back to 800 to 1000 years ago but they are more distant from our own Group 7.

When a Foster male is tested for a 37 marker test and matches another Foster male 100% then they share a common ancestor within the past 100 years of so.  We have several of those close matches within our Group 7 but so far few of us have a paper trail to prove it for sure.

That is why we are sharing what we know about our families and our heritage as we know it.  In the hope of finding our connecting ancestor so we can be sure that we are truly cousins whether or not our ancestors migrated West from the North or from the South parts of the United States.  If our DNA says that we are in Group 7 then we are related, we just need to prove it.  Isn’t interesting that the Creator of all put into the Y chromosome of all males this little piece of identification that groups us into families. 

So did God leave out women in this interesting discovery.  No, he didn’t.  But learning to read the DNA trail found in women is currently being investigated (probably by men who need a woman’s perspective and the results would be understood sooner, right?).  Thousands of women are being DNA tested so that the database will become large enough to carry the proof needed to be as accurate as what is now known about the men.  Hundreds of thousands of men have been tested at this point in time and from these samples the migration patterns are currently being plotted to show the origins of where civilization started and where man went to find his new home.  Tribes in the furthest regions of the earth have been DNA tested and interesting conclusions observed.  National Geographic’s is currently collecting this information and will publish it for all of us to read soon.  Click here to read about their DNA project.

The largest DNA project in the world (FamilyTreeDNA) to gather both genealogy from their members and their DNA samples and publish them on the Internet is the one organization that all of us in Group 7 have paid to take our inside the cheek DNA tests.  Click here in to see more about their worldwide project and click here and type in a 7 in the Foster Group ID# box to see our Group 7 batch of DNA related Foster’s.  It is my understanding that the DNA samples are kept alive in a big refrigerator in Tucson, Arizona at the University of Arizona for future testing as more understanding develops.  Other organizations are testing DNA but don’t compare the genealogies from their members to allow the more perfect matching of science and man.  FamilyTreeDNA does both and that is why we support it as the place to go to be tested. 

This means that you can be tested and the results will someday soon have meaning.  It means you can encourage your male living relatives to be tested to start or join existing DNA groups that will batch common relatives together.  This is a win win situation for everyone of every surname.  This DNA process will guide researchers like you and I to spend our research talents on the trails that have the most promise of assisting us in finding our common ancestors.

I hope this rough article will encourage and not discourage you in the value of the DNA process and why we are organizing our efforts in the Foster DNA Group 7.  We want to know…"