Hurricane Harvey delays Soule announcement

The announcement expected for tonight about the origins of either George Soule or Mary (Becket) Soule was to have been something about DNA studies. As it turned out, Hurricane Harvey has delayed the arrival of several batches of Soule cheek swabs, so we heard only part of the results. This gist is that they have gathered a good number of DNA samples from proven straight-line male Soule descendants here in the US. Each US sample, from all of George's sons who left male descendants, matched each other. The team then solicited donors in England from areas in which documentary research had shown a cluster of Soule families in the 1500s-1600s. The good news is that the men in those areas matched other men in their area but the bad news is that none of the results turned up an exact match for George. These results mean that it is unlikely George's origins were in West Sussex, southern Cambridgeshire, Buckinghamshire, Gloucestershire, or Bedfordshire. One group at least matched George's haplogroup (I, with the M-253 mutation indicating probable Scandinavian heritage) but with enough differences that any common ancestor lived several years ago, before the adoption of surnames. Results are still pending on the sample groups from Kent, East Sussex, North Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Huguenots in London, East Norfolk, Staffordshire, and Devonshire. The outcome will be announced in the Soule Kindred of America newsletter, which is available to members. (Memberships start at $35 per year, by the way, and provide some of the funding for this research.)
The picture shows researcher Caleb Johnson of MayflowerHistory.com describing how the project identified (and then ruled out) Soule population groups in England. If the next batch of results come back negative from Family Tree DNA, the plan is to look for donors in France and the Netherlands to follow up on the Huguenot theory, possibly Scotland.