Status Update on Roulston Project and Misc.

William Roulston is working on a bid for important funding for a Scottish project for the Ulster History Foundation which he expects to complete within a few weeks. I wish him great success in this endeavor, knowing full well that it will delay the start up of the Maguire/MacAuley/McCown Study.

In the meantime, progress is being made toward having our ducks in a row for him. Several potential members of the study group are sending information about their earliest known ancestors, their places of origin, period of time there, etc.. More new members already have joined the FTDNA Ulster Heritage Group (UHG) so that their information and test results can be categorized and compared against over 1,000 other members.

The Mag Uidhir II (Maguire II) group has grown by three members in the last month and three more have indicated that they are in the process of joining. The importance of that is this is the work sheet that Barry McCain uses in selecting which of these are candidates for the study. This is not elitism, because the members of the study group are there, not because they are superior in any way to the other members in Mag Uidhir II, but because the pattern of their test results clearly indicate a close group of co-located families in Fermanagh.

Some members of the Mag Uidhir II group match each other closely and some don't match closely enough for FTDNA to call them matches but all have the Maguire Y-DNA. For example, I have a mismatch of one genetic distance greater than is allowed as being a match, still he matches others that match me very well.

That means, in my view he is close enough and Barry has recognized this. My highest non-McCown match is a McGuire who matches me at 63/67 markers. The best news here is that he is expected to join the UHG
and may be added to the study group as well. Barry McCain is the final word on that, however.



Brad McGuire has taken an intiative to move things along by getting his best matches to submit their information and join the UHG as well. One of these has the grand old Scottish name of Buchanan and he has excellent Maguire DNA. Major Thomas Buchanan McGuire, one of America's top two aces in fighter planes in WWII is not known to be a relative of our William Buchanan match, but it looks as though his mother's family lived on the same block in Scotland as did William Buchanan's family in the mid 1800's.