I am happy to finally take this step and start to write this blog to share my findings from several years of research of my Mulholland family. My research so far has determined that my Mulholland family was from an area in County Antrim, Ireland and has surfaced in records from various Townlands, e.g. Ballymena, Ballytresna, and others in and around Randalstown, near Belfast. I should go back a little to describe how I determined these locations.
I remember as a child, my grandmother, Margaret Mary Mulholland (nee White) would tell me that my Grandfather, who had passed away when my Dad was only 8 years old, was from County Antrim, Ireland. She also told me that his father, my Great Grandfather was one of many children, my memory of this is vague, but I am pretty sure it was something like 12 or more children. She would also tell me that most of the family migrated to the United States, but my Great Grandfather and his own immediate family had migrated to Australia and settled in Sydney, New South Wales.....Many years later after my mother passed away suddenly, and of course my Grandmother had passed several years before that, I was kicking myself that I had not made any detailed notes, of my Grandmother's stories and also the stories told to me by my Mum about her side of the family. I decided then that it was time to start documenting my family history. Lucky for me that my Grandmother's sister was still alive at that time and was able to bring to life some of what I knew about my Grandfather Joseph Cecil Mulholland; also her grandson had started researching his family history some time before me, so he and I shared what we had by then each already recorded in a software program from Broderbund called Family Tree Maker, from my recollection it was Version 3. so of course quite a different product to the current Family Tree Maker 2012. Of course my Dad was able to fill in some details with his account of what he remembered of his Dad, his Grandfather and also his uncle, who I had not even heard of until I started asking him of his memories. I should also add that within two months of my mother's death, my father's elder brother also passed away, so it was a very difficult time for the family, and I realised that if I wanted to find out more about my family history, I could not put it off any longer. I needed to try to get as much information as I could from living relatives...you just never know what could happen when you least expect it.
Joseph Cecil Mulholland
circa. 1920.
It was 1997, and I had found out that there were places you could go to do family history research. As I worked in the City of Sydney, it was convenient for me to go to the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney www.sl.nsw.gov.au/ during my lunch breaks and try to find as much information as I could about my family history on both sides of my family. I was totally amazed that I could search for records in - Births, Deaths and Marriages indexes that had been released on microfiche by the various Australian states; the IGI (the International Genealogical Index) https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/igi, although I was not really sure whether I was finding the right people in the right places, and also newspaper microfilms, (now available online at the Trove website http://trove.nla.gov.au/ ) for any death or funeral notices for family members. There were other records like AGCI, the Australasian Genealogical Computer Index http://www.sag.org.au/helping-you/research-guides.html?task=view&id=80 and also various Cemetery transcriptions which had been released by the Society of Australian Genealogists, Sydney http://www.sag.org.au/. However, for this particular blog, I will concentrate on my paternal side, the Mulholland family.
Some months later, I started contacting other relatives after I had put together some basic family charts, I was new to this, so of course I made some mistakes, and I certainly wasn't quoting my sources as described in Elizabeth Shown Mills book Evidence Explained. https://www.evidenceexplained.com/. In fact at that time I had not even heard of Elizabeth Shown Mills and it would be some years later that her book would be published. However, I was recording basic details in my notes, which would help me later enhance and expand my source citations to today's acceptable Genealogical standards.
Well that's the introduction to my story, and I will try to come back regularly and fill in the detail and my findings along the way. I hope anyone reading this blog will find it interesting, and that it will also provide some detail for anyone related to my Mulholland family. If anyone has comments, snippets of information or questions, please feel free to contact me, or leave a comment here on the blog...I should also add, that in more recent years I have managed to find significant links to the rest of my Great Grandfather's Mulholland family that migrated to the United States and Canada, but that will become apparent in later posts.
© Geoff Mulholland 2013-2016
© Geoff Mulholland 2013-2016
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