A Brief History of Team Liddell and Group Liddesdale and Statement of Purpose

(The use of TeamLiddell as the principal identifier in this group's name is not at all intended as a slight to the other variants in the Team's surname cluster. We simply started out in early 2004 as Team Liddell after some 14 months without any type of formal identity and with no foreknowledge whatsoever that in just a few months we would grow so rapidly and expand our interests and activities to the point that an "et al" became necessary in our name. TeamLiddell in our email addresses is used today simply to save keystrokes and to continue the various Web listings and contacts we established early.

And we assure you that the Team is completely open to name-change suggestions.)

Allow us to present here a bit of our very brief history.

Team Liddell et al and then our first Group Liddesdale private website actually “just happened”. There was no design or strategy behind these two coming into being. One thing just led to another.

Originally, in late 2002, there was a cluster of three or four Mississippi Liddell cousins finding each other by accident on the Web’s genealogy boards. They were all descended from Erasmus Liddell of New Albany, Miss., whose last child of “Rad’s” pride of 12 brothers and sisters was born in 1899.

Then their postings to each other were noticed by several more-distantly related Liddells in Texas and California—all descendants of James Liddell of Abbeville, S.C., whose six sons all fought for the Continental cause in the American War of Independence, and the circle began growing from there.

In early 2004, everything suddenly began falling into place, and one suggestion gave rise to another about working together as a group to try to push back their line before James’s 1712 birth in Scotland. Even more email messages for still more kin began appearing in in-boxes asking to become part of whatever was beginning to happen.

It was quickly realized by the core members of this group that the web presented a brilliant and perhaps once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—to form a larger circle of Liddells, even of those with no interest in genealogy. This idea was already in operation when Gary W. Liddell suggested that they adopt the name Team Liddell—an identity that was immediately accepted by the informal circle of relatives, then numbering about a dozen.

Somehow, through word-of-mouth (message-of-web?), the word began to spread about these Liddells and their huge genealogy files which have been passed on from generation to generation in small Southern towns and then elsewhere as the Southern Liddells began to migrate and settle in other areas in the United States.

During 2003, it developed that David Dale West of New York state had been viewing the “Southern” Liddells with envy for years because he had been unable, despite his great genealogy skills and vast files, to resolve his Lydell wife’s surname ancestry in the New England area.

David Dale simply dropped out of the blue into the Liddells’ in-boxes one day with an “earliest” Liddell chart in his email hand and asked what the Liddells thought of it. It matched their own records to a “t” and additional exchanges with David Dale concerning the Scotland origins of the Liddells advanced to the point that David Dale West made the suggestion that the Liddells look into a possible connection to the (de) Soulis (French Norman) family of Scotland as a possible source of origin. (The family’s surname is sometimes spelled de Soules and otherwise. Early Scotland records are very unreliable.)

This led to Team Liddell’s contacting Frank Flint Soule of Illinois, the 2003-04 president of the Soule Kindred in America, Inc. family association—a Mayflower family—about his knowledge of the (de) Soulis, of whom he knew little because his branch is English and the (de) Soulis were Scottish, although both branches have common ancestors back in 11th-Century Normandy and in the armies of William the Conqueror. While Frank Flint could help only to a degree with the Scottish de Soulis lines, his association does have some good reference material and some rare books about their oldest lines which were generously shared with the Liddells and which brought about a number of genealogical breakthroughs and reinterpretations of past events in the Scot de Soulis’ early history by the Liddells.

The word about Team Liddell continued to spread and other individuals with (probably) related surnames based on Liddesdale began contacting Team Liddell members to ask to see their files or for help with their own. At the same time, Team Liddell began producing the irregularly issued but generally monthly file titled The Liddell Collection, which brought the realization in its third edition—the April 2004 one—that the files were getting too big for use as attachments to email messages.

It was also at this time that one member volunteered two huge files of suspected Liddesdale-related email addresses he had gathered over several years which could be used to inform others that Team Liddell was on a roll and breaking through some old genealogical barriers. The preliminary use of these files caused Team Liddell to triple in size to more than 50 members and extend itself into seven nations and three continents in a mere 10 days. In recent months, the Team has added three more nations.

In early 2004, the modern Liddell genealogists learned from James W. Liddell of a relatively obscure “History of Liddells” that was nearly 400 pages in length and covered the various lines coming from James Liddell of Abbeville, S.C., and earlier of Scotland—probably Roxbroughshire and born 1712 according to general opinion—and covering the Southern Liddells from his birth year through 1958. The book was compiled by James Thomson Liddell and his daughter, Anna Laura Liddell Murchison, both of Louisiana in the mid-1950s, along with the use of countless genealogy files but principally those of Ximena Liddell Parsons of Atlanta, and for a period, of Tupelo, Miss. (See her history in the April Edition of The Liddell Collection at Group Liddesdale.)

(It has since been determined that this book—which was produced in one master “all lines” version and one each “take-out” version for the three sons of James/712 who survived the War—has a sizable number of errors and omissions, and should be used as a general guide only. “Xime” obtained one of the few bound copies which were produced for James Thompson’s immediate family only, and was correcting and updating it when she died in the late 1990s, and a 2004 phone conversation with Anna Laura reviewed that she, also, was aware of considerable errors.)

The Southern Liddells also realized that since the Liddell surname possessors were apparently the largest group by far of the Liddesdale variant spelling surnames, they had a responsibility to assist the smaller surname groups just as they had been assisted by the Soules.

Thus, the group’s name was changed to Team Liddell et al to take into account the other variant surnames present in their ranks and the first Group Liddesdale, was formed by the Team to serve as a collecting and meeting place for all the Liddesdale variant-surnamed families.

This first Group Liddesdale site became the model for the next two—Group Liddesdale2 and Group Liddesdale3—and each serves as a membership-wide filing cabinet that everyone can open and a library where everyone can read each others’ materials.

Team Liddell et al continues to be the primary interpersonal activity, with the three Group Liddesdale sites serving as the Team’s file cabinets, each with a distinct nature. The files at Group Liddesdale are the most eclectic—histories of the various families, general reference materials on research methodology, DNA/mtDNA and Scotland, and a number of essays on specific subjects of interest to the Team. In October 2004, this site contained more than 17 megabytes of files.

Group Liddesdale2 is still under construction as of October 2004 but will soon be devoted to a collection of copies of scanned publications of interest to the Team. The first file-set will be a digital copy of a highly informative tourist brochure on The Hermitage Castle in Liddesdale which contains brief histories of the nobles who have held this “Strength of Liddesdale”.

Group Liddesdale3 contains sizable databases pertaining to the various surnames represented or potentially represented by Team Liddell et al. Most of the databases are “raw” but some analyses have already been posted for a few. More than 38,000 individuals with Liddesdale-derived surnames are included in these files which extend from the 1400s through the 1800s for northern England and southern and central Scotland.

All three Group Liddesdales are unlisted and cannot be found by any search engines. Additionally, all are available only to the Team’s membership and cannot be accessed by a non-member in any manner whatsoever.

Please don’t be misled by the various names of the Team’s websites—the membership is exactly the same in all of the Team’s activities which encompasses individuals bearing all of the variant surnames as full members.

The Liddell surname, itself, is just another of the variants and has no special place in our mutual history. It is used as the team’s primary identifier only because the majority of the Team Liddell members have Liddell family connections.

It has become apparent that some of the Team members gathering under our tent are still struggling to find their way back to Scotland or northern England from out of the United States and/or Canada or even from other places. Others have succeeded in getting back to Scotland but then they have run into the “1600’s barrier” for all of the variant surnames.

This barrier exists for anyone attempting to get back past the great destruction of public and church records during three hundred years of rebellion, war and conflict in Scotland.

Still other Team members are just starting out in genealogy and are doubtful of even their own grandfather’s parents, and these are being assisted by more-knowledgeable Team members through on-line teaching and assistance with the records.

The DNA/mtDNA study launched October 15, 2004 is the Team’s best current effort to in-gather the various families of the Liddesdale Diaspora and reassemble our core family, for the Y-DNA and mtDNA tests are excellent, science-based ways of proving kinships.

Here, again, the Southern Liddells are paying a key role in that they will soon have the DNA test results for three six-cousins to establish their well-documented line as a benchmark for all others in the Team Liddell et al DNA/mtDNA Study to compare to in hopes of linkages.

Also in October 2004, the Team began work on its first public website—www.oocities.org/teamliddelldna—where test-results comparison charts will be maintained using code identifiers for each study participant. William “Bill” Liddle is the “webservant”—as he terms himself—who put it together for the Team.

Group Liddesdale3 will serve as the Team’s permanent depository for these test results to give hope to each of the surnames, all accepted as our kin, and to someday provide an “electronic table” where everyone can lay down their charts and DNA/mtDNA test results and compare each to the other. Additional CD-ROM copies will eventually be deposited worldwide in the genealogy departments of several universities as an additional effort to make the Team’s product permanently available to future generations.

Finally, the Team has begun collecting copies of the genealogy files of its members, again with the purpose of creating permanent files both on the Web and at the selected universities which have a better chance to survive the risks of house fires, unappreciative heirs, and floods, hurricanes and tornados.

It will be only through our mutually assisting each other that our own problems and our mutually obscure origins can finally be solved and a permanent basis be established for those who come after us.

(Edited by Jack Dalton Wardlaw, Editor-Team Liddell et al, Oct 2004)

Top of Page