New-found Cousin

A couple of years ago Aidan noticed that Robbie Burns Day, celebrated on January 25 in Canada, coincided with Australia Day, January 26 Australian time. Inspired by this discovery he decided to google his Scottish grandfather, Hugh Murdoch Brand who emigrated to Australia in 1918. One of the hits of Aidan's search was the picture to the left of my grandfather taken in 1906, part of a treasure trove of Brand family history on Ancestry.com. One of the key sources of the material was Sean Mulroy, a second cousin we'd never met living in Geelong in the state of Victoria, Australia. Sean's grandfather Tom Mulroy and my grandmother Katherine Mulroy were brother and sister. Aidan struck up a correspondence with Sean and I soon joined in. When he heard that Penny and I were planning to visit Australia in the early part of our retirement he suggested we try to meet up. Luckily for us, Sean is a truly inspired genealogist and took extraordinary measures to ensure a get-together. So it was that on our arrival at Melbourne airport, Sean and his wife Sheenagh were there to meet us. They whisked us away to a restaurant where we sat for a couple of hours catching up on generations of Brand and Mulroy family history.

 

                 Hugh Murdoch Brand

Katherine Mulroy

Sean had a file full of original photographs,  copies of historical family documents and news clippings relating to my grand parents. One of the most  interesting pieces in his collection was a slip of paper with my dad's name and address hand written on one side and a short 'family tree' hand written on the other side - in Penny's hand writing! Sean explained that he had acquired the slip from his English grandmother, and together we pieced together the background. As Penny and I headed south from Scotland after working the summer season at the John Ridgway School of Adventure in 1978, my dad asked us to call in to visit his Uncle Tom in Yorkshire. We did so and were warmly welcomed by the Mulroy branch of the family whom we had never met. During that meeting the slip of paper with dad's name and address was produced and Penny wrote out the family tree with my two brothers and I.  Now here we were seeing it again with our new-found relatives 36 years and half a world away!