Project formed July 20, 2005.

What we THINK we know so far as of Jan 15 2014

      A man from Scotland with the surname RIDDELL left for unknown reasons, possibly after being evicted by the king of Scotland when the king was evicting Catholics.
Once in America the name appears as something like Murderall, (the “d” may have been pronounced “th” with the old Scottish accent)
We have heard stories about a clan (of Riddells?) possibly from Motherwell, was either fighting with another Riddell family (or an unrelated family) and upon being evicted from their homeland MURDERED the other clan in retaliation or vengeance or to “save the abused children?” (Good or bad what was done is lost to history), and then they left before they could be caught. Hence the name change…MURDER-ALL?

But for all we really know when boarding a ship bound for America some one may have asked in English “What are your names”  and it was understood as “What are your from? ”Answer: Motherwell (with an accent “Motherall”?)
Or even “Who is the mother-of-all these little children running crazy all over the ship?” sheepish little fingers point to the mother and they ask her name, and she says, Mother-of-all, yes me!”
It’s fun to speculate…
In those times it was mostly “spoken” surnames with nothing much written, except in records of ships passenger lists, taxes, land owner lists etc.
Whether to hide from enemies or to have a placeholder name for Motherwell or a simple error, we may never know the reason for the name change.
It would be normal to mix up the “d” and “th” in the Scotland and America of old though.
Due to unwritten surnames, numerous variations on spellings proliferated when families became more literate.
We think it was first pronounced Murderal or Murtheral, or Motherwel, then many variants from those three like, Motheral, Moderwel, Modrel, Modral and Modrall etc.

At this time Ryan Modrall has been placed solidly on the RIDDELL DNA family tree with a 67 marker test, a 111 marker test has been ordered along with an L21 SNP.
We suspect that if you match with MODRALL DNA that you will also match with the RIDDELL DNA so Please join the RIDDELL project as well!. Gail RIDDELL is a great Genetics project administrator and her calculations with numerous programs have returned the MODRALL branch back to the RIDDELL family tree somewhere around 300-700 years ago, so far...

With more male Modralls and variants testing to 67 and 111 markers we can delve deeper and get more accurate results.