About The Cisneros Project

The Cisneros Project is an independent, volunteer effort to identify and trace the many distinct Cisneros lineages, using Y-DNA studies from the Cisneros Surname Project at FamilyTreeDNA and traditional genealogy. It is also a place to tell the history of the Cisneros name and the stories of the families who carry it. The goal is to bring together Cisneros families from Spain to the Americas and beyond, and to understand how they are, and are not, connected.

What this site is for

Because Cisneros began as a place name, it was adopted by many unrelated households, so there is no single Cisneros family tree. This project exists to map those separate paternal lines, to document the family histories behind them, and to give every Cisneros a place to discover where their own branch fits. It is part genealogy archive, part genetic study, and part meeting point for relatives who might otherwise never find one another.

What you will find here

The genetic side of the work is carried out through the Cisneros Surname Project at FamilyTreeDNA, where Y-DNA results from Cisneros men around the world are compared to reveal which lines share a common ancestor and which arose independently. Around that, this website gathers documented lineages, research into the family and its name, stories on the blog, and a growing record that anyone with the surname is welcome to add to.

Everything here is offered freely. This is a labor of love rather than a business, built to preserve family history and to connect people who share the name, wherever in the world they happen to live.

About the founder

The Cisneros Project is founded and maintained by Mario E. Cisneros. He grew up in Miami, Florida, where he still lives, and holds a degree in biology from Florida International University. He is a wildlife photographer whose work has taken him on assignments for National Geographic and other media outlets, and in his spare time he volunteers in sea turtle conservation. That same fascination with the living world eventually drew him toward genetics.

Mario serves as a volunteer administrator of the Cisneros Surname Project at FamilyTreeDNA. For him, genetic genealogy is a natural extension of his background in biology and something he pursues as a hobby, following the threads of DNA much as he follows wildlife through a lens. His own paternal line runs first to Mexico City and then, further back, to Spain. That search carried him from Miami to the archives and cemeteries of Seville, and finally to the town of Cisneros in northern Spain, where a Y-DNA test matched him to a man whose family had lived there for centuries.

You can read the full story of that journey on the blog.