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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