by Dick Chandler

For those who are interested, this page will provide a more thorough discussion of the reasoning behind the Genetic Chandler Families project on this website. Providing a home on the CFA web site for all Chandler families will benefit not only the CFA but also the Chandler DNA Project, the Chandler One-Name Study, and all Chandler researchers.


Family historians are always encountering roadblocks. As their research progresses, the roadblocks are met earlier and earlier in history. The lineage of many of our members, and also the DNA Project participants who are not CFA members, is roadblocked in the 17th Century, when records are sparse. Eventually all of the roadblocks will be in England, where the candle-making trade gave rise to the surname some 600 years ago. It is vital that we attract more DNA project participants in America, England and other English-speaking countries: preferably people whose lineage is already well researched. The American descendants of 1610 immigrant John Chandler and the “George and Jane” line (Groups 7A and 7B) are already well represented in the DNA Project: it is their English cousins we must find. All the other genetic families (more than 50 of them) desperately need more matching DNA participants to provide clues (place, name, date) for further progress with their families’ origins: BUT hardly any of them have an effective means of “advertising” their need in the modern Internet-based world. For this reason, we have developed a new facility aimed at attracting people with known Chandler history to join the DNA project.

We can now offer each genetic family the opportunity to ‘advertise’ their family story free of charge on a page of the CFA web site. This is not for detailed family trees, rather for factual but hopefully interesting accounts of the currently known genetic family i.e. a chance to tell a summarised story of each genetic family, with a picture or two, and hopefully attract others who may belong to the same genetic family and get them to test, which may provide extra information to help us all. Authors can choose to be anonymous or not. Each page will start with the genetic Chandler family number, the earliest known ancestor(s) of that family, and the dates and location where they lived. These keywords would be picked up by internet search engines, so that anyone interested in Chandlers in that family’s ancestral area would be pointed to the relevant story. The well researched lines will be the most comprehensive and will have more interesting historical facts to choose from.

Return to the Genetic Chandler Families page to view the table of 50-plus distinct families. We will continue to add the family stories as they are collected.