"Cousin" might be stretching the term. There's a 91 percent chance I share a common ancestor with any of these men -- a common ancestor 24 generations or 1,000 years ago. My cousins have last names like O'Brien, Rusher, Suthpin, Bedell and Floyd.

To narrow my search, this year I upgraded to a 67-marker test. In the DNA genealogical business, the more markers tested, and the closer two men match, the more likely they have a recent ancestor in common.

Now I have 11 more cousins with a 23 or 24 out of 25-marker match, most of them Armstrongs. One of them is a 60 out of 67 match.

I got my DNA tested to help fill in some blanks in my family's past. I haven't quite made that connection back to Ireland or Scotland -- the probable origins of my great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel Armstrong -- but along the way I've learned about my more recent relatives.

How and why all this works punches the limits of my liberal arts education. My oldest sister, Marcia, sells DNA testing equipment. While you don't need a Ph.D. from Harvard like she has to do her job, it doesn't hurt. Anyway, genealogical DNA testing looks at how rapidly mutating sections of DNA change over thousands of years. Analyzing those sections shows a pattern passed on from father to son, expressed as a string of numbers. It's like a bar code passed down the male line.

If another guy's Y-DNA has that same string, we're cousins. I'm in the R1B haplogroup, a genetic combination common in Western Europe and Great Britain. In some parts of Britain or Spain, 70 percent of the men are in the R1B haplogroup. I could have millions of cousins.

We Armstrongs come from the Anglo-Scottish Borders, the boundary between England and Scotland. My clan lived in the western part of the Borders, in the Liddesdale and Eskdale river valleys. Among our group we have Fairbairns, Traynors, Strongs, Strangs and, yes, Nixons. I've visited Clan Armstrong territory. It's full of ruined castles; stark, treeless moors; and a lot of people who look just like me. We raided and got raided upon into and out of England. An archbishop cursed us. King James V hung one Armstrong, Johnny Gilnockie, and 50 of his men.

In the early 17th century when the Scottish King James VI became the English King James I, he rounded up many of the Border clans and shipped them off to Ulster in Northern Ireland. We're Scotch-Irish, we Armstrongs, part of the tough and rowdy colonists who settled America.

How my Armstrongs got to the New World, I don't know. Our Armstrong line runs back to Simcoe County, Ontario, in Canada. My great-great-grandfather William Armstrong was born in Quebec, and I think his father, Samuel, came from Ireland. Where and when, I don't know.

That's the mystery. My sister Janet has been doing a lot of the old-fashioned genealogical research, death certificate by death certificate, which is how she found out our great-grandfather, John Thomas Armstrong, had run off to Duluth, Minn., from Canada, and had a second family. Dad had told us John Thomas died in a logging accident when Grandpa was 10. Surprise!

Getting a Y-DNA match gives us new leads, though so far nothing has panned out. I'm a member of the Armstrong DNA project, as is my old Diamond Ridge neighbor, John Armstrong. As more Armstrongs get their DNA tested and search out their past, the bigger the pool. It's like going to an Alaska party where everyone seems to be a stranger, but when you start comparing notes and background, you find out you have a lot of friends in common.

Or ancestors. In King James' day, we were, as one scribe described the Armstrongs, "a numerous and turbulent clan, ill to tame" -- but not that many, no more than 10,000. In four centuries we've spread around the world, millions strong now.

When my eyes glaze over looking at strings of numbers and I try one more lead, I ask myself why I do this. I know much about my father, less about my grandfather, and hardly anything of the men who preceded us. Learning more about my ancestors might tell me more about who I am.

In another part of my life, I play the African marimba, the music of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. Marimbas have a buzzer on the resonators that gives the music a distinctive hum. That hum is said to be the voice of the ancestors.

I seek out my geneaology because I can hear the buzz of my ancestors. I do not know the songs they sing to me, and so I keep searching, with hopes that one day I will hear their music, strong and clear and distinct.

Michael Armstrong can be reached at michaelarmstrong.@homernews.com.