During the last 20 years, I have been researching official records and documenting LOWE families of Virginia and Maryland in an attempt to find my closest LOWE family relatives. In the last five years, I have noticed the number of successful kinship connections made with Surname NRY men’s DNA matching projects. So I initiated the LOWE men’s DNA Y (NRY) chromosome study at Family Tree DNA in Houston to try to link my fourth great grand-father Zadock Lowe to other related LOWES-LOWS from Monroe County, and Roane Counties, West Virginia using 12 and 25 marker DNA Y chromosome marker matches. My second goal, is to find LOWES in this country or Europe that match our NRY DNA markers and/or whose familial lineage has been thoroughly documented by genealogical records back to an European ancestor.

Zadock and Sarah Lowe had 8 sons among his 10 children born in near Upper Marlboro, Prince Georges County, Maryland and after 1782 Monroe (then Greenbrier, Virginia), West Virginia. Over the last 20 years, I have documented +5100 descendants of Zadock and their spouses but have no records to prove who his siblings were. Now NRY DNA testing offers us a chance to match on DNA markers and find his closest kin. We suspect that his parents were William and Eleanor Lowe of Upper Marlboro and their sons Elias and William to be two of his brothers and DNA matching might help us prove or disprove this hypothesis.

We believe that one of these related Lowes was Levi Lowe who married Sarah Kincaid in 1785 in Monroe County, West Virginia. Levi had four documented children, perhaps more, and twelve of his son Matthew Lowe’s 14 children settled in Roane County, West Virginia about 1846-1848. By testing and matching Levi Lowe’s great grandsons DNA to Zadock Lowe descendants we can hope to prove kinship.

This long-lived Lowe in 1802 married Mary Swope in Monroe County, West Virginia and they moved through Lee County, Virginia to Loe’s branch near Habersham Campbell County, Tennessee. Fielding had 14 children by his 3 wifes. Many of these children remained in Campbell County but other children settled in Ray and Mercer Counties, Missouri. These Missouri Lowes had their name changed to Loe.

Nehemiah and Parmelia (Mockbee) Lowe settled after his Revolutionary War Service Moved from Upper Marlboro, Prince Georges County, Maryland to near Rock Hall, Montgomery County, Maryland. We believe that Nehemiah Lowe might be kin to the Lev, Fielding, and Zadock Lowe and to prove this assumption a DNAtest with Nehemiah’s great grandsons is imperative.

We would like to have great grandsons of Patrick and Jane (Harpur) Lowe from Denby, England who descendants settled as Catholic refugees in St. Marys County, Maryland to join our LOWE men’s NRY DNA testing project. Also to include Major John Lowe’s from Prince Georges County, Maryland great grandsons to include in our project.

Many other Lowe lineages settled in the early colonies and since that time the knowledge of their immigrant ancestry and family history has been lost through the generations. It is also our hope to include many these “lost” LOWE lineages in our study to help researchers find their kin in this country and second to find their ancestral kin from their European, Asian, Australian, African, and native-American homelands.

So we invite all LOWE lineages to join our LOWE men’s DNA NRY project to find their kin and ancestry.