I have been researching the Munley / Manley / Monnelly / Munnelly surname for eight or nine years. This is what I have found out.

The original Monnelly / Munnelly surname appears almost nowhere else except County Mayo and is statistically uncommon even there. There appear to be three "clusters" of the surname in County Mayo today: the Killala-Ballina area, the Crosmolina area, and the Belmullet-Geesala area.

There are family stories and a written reference to the fact that the Monnelly / Munnelly surname originally came from a group of fighting men from the Doherty clan. From Peter Manley's website:

http://members.cox.net/pjmanley/manley/john_1841.htm

"The name appears to have originated within the Ó Dochartaigh (Doherty) Clan, who were a dominant force on the Inishowen Penninsula of County Donegal. According to John O'Donovan in the Ordinance Survey Letters (1839), Monaoile Ó Dochartaigh of Inishowen moved his kinsmen to County Mayo sometime in the 16th century.
The place where they resettled became known as "Baile Monaoile." Baile is the Irish word for home or settlement. The name was eventually Anglicized and became "Ballymonnelly," a townland that still exists in Kiltane Parish in County Mayo.

Monaoile Ó Dochartaigh's male descendants began using the name Ó Monaoile (O meaning "from"). Ó Monaoile was anglicized to O' Monnelly or O' Munnelly and the O was eventually dropped. The name had several variant spellings in Mayo that were likely the result of however the parish priest decided to spell what he was hearing. It is believed that all Manleys and Munleys with roots in County Mayo were originally Monnellys or Munnellys and can all be traced to this one Doherty clan. While not a common Irish surname, there were many of these families scattered around the northern half of Mayo in the middle of the 19th century.
There were quite a few Monnelly / Munnelly families that immigrated to the Pennsylvania coal mining areas during the famine years and immediately after. The name was often changed in the US to the Anglicized Manley in many families over time.

The Manley surname DNA project includes several descendents from these original Mayo Monnelly / Munnelly immigrants.

I have recently discovered (quite by chance) that all of these male Monnelly / Munnelly descendents who have been tested with the 37-marker DNA test have an unusual value in one of the markers. This value occurs normally less than 1% of the time. The liklihood is that there is a single common ancestor for all of these people. This value does not occur in any Dohertys, so we can assume that the mutation or change in value happened after 1600-1650 or 350 years ago or less.

We desparately need more male straight-line descendents of the County Mayo Munley / Manley / Monnelly / Munnellys to have their DNA tested to determine the relationships among these families.

The cost of the 37-marker test is $189.00 if you join the Manley DNA surname project.

The Manley DNA web site is here

http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~chatsol/

You can find out more about the DNA testing here

https://www.familytreedna.com/surname_join.aspx?code=P73998&...;...

I hope to see some of your test results soon.

Marianne Manley Granoff
(gggranddaughter of Michael Monnelly of Belmullet, Co. Mayo)
Albuquerque, NM
granoff@zianet.com