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September 15,  2004

Meneely Newsletter #2

 

Dear Friends and Family,

 

First of all I want to thank all of you who have forwarded this on to family members in your address books. As you can see the list of people who are receiving this grows every month. If you see, however, that this is going to a "Larry" or a "Mike" please do not assume that it is your brother, or cousin or whatever as it may be my brother or cousin.

 

Work on the Clan Committee is progressing. Let us thank everyone who has

volunteered. First of all let us thank and acknowledge Skip Meneely for being the

first to volunteer to help on the committee.

 

Here is the Clan Committee so far:

 

Skip Meneely, Clan Genealogist

Grant Nicol, Clan Historian

Larry Meneely, Clan Registrar USA &Canada

Sam Meneely, Clan Registrar UK &Ireland

Vence Meneely, Clan Coordinator

 

Skip lives in Texas and is the nephew of A. Howard Meneely who was the president

of Wheaton College for many years.

 

Grant resides in Alberta, Canada and is a descendant of Jeremiah Meneely one of four men who started the great Ulster Revival in the mid 1800's.

 

Larry hails from New Jersey and is the only member of the committee who I can prove a relationship to. We are both descended from John Meneely (our nearest common ancestor) who was born in Ireland in 1787 or 1788.

 

Sam calls the western isle of Lewis off the coast of Scotland his home. His ancestors left County Tyronne for Glasgow in the mid 1800's. Lastly, myself. I live in Oklahoma.

 

As you can see we have a pretty diverse cross section of the many different legs of the family represented on the committee. There is however, room for more and there are still a few branches of the family not represented. Anyone wishing to serve please don't hesitate to contact me. It would really be nice to have some more of you come on board.

 

We also want to take this time to send out a big THANK YOU to Melissa Meneely who owns the Meneely.net domain for offering to host information for us. If there are any of you out there who are web savvy and know how to design web pages we could certainly use some help.

 

Many of you have asked "Why is the reunion planned for 2012?"  For those of you who already know please bare with me. The answer is; originally this was planned to be a lot smaller affair and 2012 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of  Noble Cunningham Meneely. He was the first in my particular line to be born in the USA and there are quite a few of us who come from him. We do not have an exact address for the get together yet but are looking in to finding a place there on Meneely Street in Nevins Township, Vigo County, Indiana.

 

There has been more than one or two who have expressed a desire to have an additional gathering at an earlier date. If there is enough interest that would be a grand idea! There are several different places that have an annual "gathering of the clans". One is on Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina, there is one annually in New Hampshire, another in Texas and many more.

 

There are also some of our extended family members serving in the armed forces overseas. My oldest son is serving his second combat tour in Iraq. Any of you out there who knows of any other of our numbers serving, please forward their address to me and we will include it in the next newsletter. For those of you who have asked as well as for those of you who are going to ask here is my son's address:

 

Cpl. Meneely, D.T. 4118

1/7 C. Co. 2nd Plt.

Unit 41530

FPO/AP 96426-1530

 

His e-mail is chief_e3@yahoo.com

 

He personally knew 5 of the 7 Marines who were killed by that car bomb on September 5th. The officer who was killed had been my his platoon commander during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

 

Next month we will be putting out letters via snail mail to every Meneely household we can find to get more e-mail addresses as well as to inform every one what we are trying to do. It is also possible we may be able to gather some more genealogical information for our data base. In our next newsletter we will cover some topics like... are we Irish or Ulster Scots (Scots Irish)?...  What is our relationship to the MacNeill (Scottish) clan?... What is our relationship to the O'Neil (Irish) clan?...What is our relationship to the O'Dochartaigh (Irish) clan?.. We will also be including biographies of the members of the Clan Committee as a way of introducing ourselves to the rest of you.

 

In the near future we will be including some biographies of some of the founders of our respective lines. Many of you would be much more capable than I to contribute for your own particular ancestor. We also will be discussing the ongoing patrilineal DNA testing program that is sponsored by The Clans of Ireland.

 

Some of you have reported difficulty sending e-mail to me. Please make sure you are using the address below.

 

Please forward this to all your relatives in your address books!

 

Peace and Blessings,

 

Vence Meneely