2005 MAR 09

Once again I want to first welcome those of you who have just started receiving this newsletter. I hope that you will find it both enlightening and informative. Let us also take this time to thank everyone who has sent their information in to our Clan Registrar USA/Canada, Larry Meneely and still we want to encourage those of you who have not taken the time to do so, to please make the time and effort to assist us in this endeavor. There are some of you out there who have completed some research and compiled a family file. We beg of you to go into your computer and open up your file and forward it to us.

Accolades go out to cousin Dave Cuzzort on the fine work he has done on the Meneely Clan website. Those of you who have not yet visited the site or those of you who have not gone there recently should do so now. The address is http://clan.meneely.net/ . Dave has made many additions to the site including many links to the information where I have done a lot of my research. Be prepared though, as you can spend hours surfing around on these links. I have been asked to express to all of you that the recent interruptions on the website were due in part to: Dean and Melissa upgrading the hardware and software for the server and there were a few days down time because of DSL line problems with MCI. Let me also take this time to remind you that the website belongs to all of Y-O-U. Anyone who wishes to add information and or pictures to the site is welcome and encouraged to do so. Our failure or success in large depends upon everyone's willingness to share and to contribute.

Next let us shed some light on some noticeable research discrepancies. As time goes by we have more and more records available to our disposal so research becomes easier and more accurate. There have been some fellow family researchers who have, from time to time, come up with different facts and sometimes these include either dates, names or places. For instance some members of my particular branch of the family have had a much later death date for Noble Cunningham Meneely, some also have him being born in Pa. instead of NY. I show Noble's death to have occurred on April 16, 1879. There are two things that support this date: #1 his wife is on the 1880 census and he is not, #2 April 16, 1879 is on his tombstone something which is hard to argue with. I believe that many thought Noble to be born in Pa. because in the "Family Record of John C Meneely" it states that Noble's brother John was born there. It was reasonable to assume then that Noble was born there also. That is not the case, however, as records from the First Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York show that Noble was christened there in May of 1812 and he had elder siblings christened there before him. There is also an apparent difference between what many researchers in my particular line believe to be true and what is shown on Dan Meneely's Online Bell Museum. There are some family records on Dan's website which were done by Philena (Hanks) Meneely, the widow of Andrew. Philena states that Andrew was the oldest son of Andrew James and Eleanor (Cobb) Meneely. Many of my fellow researchers, including myself believe that John C Meneely who was born in Ireland in 1787 or 1788 to be Andrew's elder brother. There are many things which point to this as being true, most of which Larry so eloquently examined in his addendum to the "Family Record of John C Meneely". There is another fact which also lends credibility to this assertion: my gr-great grandpa John Clinton Meneely's younger brother was named, you guessed it, Andrew James Meneely. Now all of this leads to a couple of possible scenarios; #1 we are wrong, #2 Philena was wrong or #3 John C Meneely was Andrew's elder half brother. The son of Andrew James Meneely but not of Eleanor Cobb. One theory is that Andrew James Meneely's first wife may have been the sister of John Clinton. This would explain a lot of things, including the relationship between the Meneely family and the Clinton family. It would also help explain Harmon's claim that the "C" which appears many times as an initial for someone's middle name to stand for Clinton and that it goes back to the McClintock family of Scotland and Ireland. This at least gives us some fodder for future digestion.

While doing research here recently I did a search at ancestry.com for John Meneely on the 1860 federal census. I got 5 hits; two of which were my gr-gr-gr-great grandpa and his son John C Meneely, who were in Michigan Township, Clinton County, Indiana. There was a John Meneely in California and one in New York. There was another who was a big surprise; an additional John Meneely in Clinton County, Indiana. None of us knows what the connection was but certainly they (our ancestors) did. And no, it was not a repeated record of one of the aforementioned John Meneelys as it appeared to be the same census taker and the ages were different. To top it all off, there was at least one John Meneely missing on that search. We know that my gr-great grandpa was living in Nevins Township, Vigo County but his name was spelled incorrectly by the census taker (imagine that). I wonder how many other John Meneelys were missed in a like manner?

In previous editions of this letter we have discussed that the name Meneely comes from the Gaelic name Mac an Fhilidh which means "son of the poet". Now before any of you go running off with some romantic notion after watching the movie "Braveheart" that we were kilt clad "warrior poets" running around the battlefield with Robert the Bruce and William Wallace... let's examine a few things. As romantic an tempting an idea that might be it would be a false notion. First of all we were not Highlanders, we were Lowland Scots as were Robert the Bruce and William Wallace and in fact all the noble houses of Scotland were Lowlanders. Lowland Scots did not wear kilts. First of all the Gaelic word "Fhilidh" stood for a specialized kind of poet which was a "file". Secondly the Gaelic word for a poet who had gone mad from the atrocities he had witnessed in warfare which forced him to live a hermits life was "geilt". The Lowland Scots readily intermarried with the native Pictish peoples of Scotland and quickly gave up their "Clannish" way of life to adopt feudalism with the arrival of the Normans to Great Britain. Don't let this throw you as the Lowland Scots were a very tough people and had existed as a buffer between the English and the Highlanders. That was one of the reasons they so readily left Scotland for Ireland during the plantation. It seems that life was extremely difficult when you were constantly in danger of having your livestock stolen and crops or home destroyed either by the Highlanders or the English. Also after coming to America these hardy people made up the bulk of our frontier. During the American Revolution the Scots-Irish made up about ten percent of the population but they made up over thirty percent of our revolutionary force. It has also been said that no Scots-Irish family was comfortable after immigrating to America until they had moved at least twice. Many of the Ulster Scots were more than a little disillusioned after fighting for independence and against unfair taxation, one of the first things that President George Washington did in order to get the new country on it's feet financially was to adopt a new tax. Well the thing that was decided to tax first was whiskey. This did not set well with many of our ancestors contemporaries as the Scots-Irish Americans thought a man ought to be able to either eat or drink his own corn without being taxed. This "whiskey rebellion" helped to open up and settle many new parts of America. Rather than pay the taxes many people simply left Pennsylvania and followed the Allegheny Mountains to the southern frontier. (Pennsylvania had the largest population of Ulster Scots settlers than any other colony.) If any of you have been to the Clan website and listened to "Grand Time Coming" performed by an Ulster folk group it is easy to see where Bluegrass music got its roots.

Now I don't know about any of the rest of you, but I must confess that I can not help but to start to tap my foot when I listen to "Grand Time Coming". I could never understand why a lad from Indiana would like bluegrass. Or for that matter why the largest bluegrass festival in the world, Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Festival is held in the little town of Bean Blossom, Indiana. (Yes that is a real town, it is right next door to the hamlet of Gnaw Bone, Indiana) After all Indiana fought on the Union side during the Civil War. Maybe the reason for this is something deeply ingrained in my inner most self. Perhaps it is an Ulster Scots thing. Now I know that a lot of you reading this are very educated people. Some of you are doctors, layers or have graduate degrees. Having a good education is also culturally a Scots-Irish thing. John C Meneely, the first in my line to come to America in 1795 was an educated man. He piloted a steamboat on the Hudson River and after moving to Ohio in the 1830's taught school. The Irish Presbyterians placed a great emphasis on education. Now on the other end of the spectrum... do any of you know where the terms "hillbilly" or "redneck" come from? Well, they too are from Lowland Scots, but we will cover this in our next letter.

As you are looking at it... supporting the shield on the left side is a lion rampant signifying our Scottish lineage, it is supported on the right by an Irish wolfhound rampant which stands for Ireland. The crest atop the helmet is a fist holding a dagger which signifies our willingness to defend our family, clan and country. There is a potato vine entwined around the crest to signify an agricultural link as we were originally a farming people. The motto at the top is Deus, Familia, Gens which stands for God, Family, Country. The emblems on the shield are; upper right third the "red hand of Ulster" which we find on the Ulster Provincial Flag and on the official Coat-of-Arms for Northern Ireland. It is one of the oldest symbols from that old province of Ireland: the upper left third is a Saltire or the "Cross of Saint Andrew" which stands for Scots + Christian: the bottom third is a salmon which stands for the long journey many of our family members have made to new lands. Draped over the shield is a scarlet cloak with bright yellow feathers worn by the Fhilidh of old to signify our earliest Gaelic origins.