n a message dated 5/30/2011 3:45:14 A.M. Central Daylight Time, alexanderpatterson@btinternet.com writes: Great post, but I'm having difficulty working out where Bill's comments end and yours start. Can you clarify? Bill's comments came from this paragraph. "The testees in each of these nine surname clusters have a MRCA who lived at approximately the time given in the table. In Figure 1, going upward from the bottom right toward the top, the Cowan surname cluster members had an earliest progenitor at RCC ~ 13 (1250-1300 AD) who shared the progenitor of the McCord and McAdam surname cluster members at RCC ~19 (about 940 AD). That progenitor who lived at RCC ~ 19 shared a progenitor at RCC~ 26 (575 AD) with the progenitor of the Howle and Davidson cluster at RCC ~ 18.5 (970 AD). The progenitor at RCC ~26 shared a progenitor of the Dunbar-Doherty-McGonigal group at RCC ~28 (470 AD) and finally, we reach the Ewing progenitor who was common to, and shared by them all at RCC ~ 38.5 (85 BC). The descendants of this Ewing progenitor formed different lines of descent because of mutations and those lines eventually became surnames in about 900-1100 AD, one of which was Ewing." I followed his logic in two different charts I promised earlier not to post to the list. It's actually easier to visualize what he's saying if you look at the charts. John