Stories of Agnes Cahill

Francis James Woodlands, my Dad, was born in a small private hospital in Victoria Avenue, Chatswood on 31 December 1920.  Dad celebrated his birthday on New Year's Eve for 89 years prior to his death on 18 August 2010 at Royal North Shore Hospital.  Family history didn't become my passion until after Dad's death but he was a great story teller and is often with me on this journey.  While there were many stories of his parents' families, the lingering question of what happened to his father's sister was one I tried to solve for Dad and his cousin Gail in 2008. I now realise what a novice I was back then!  Gail and I now have the answer but, along the way,  we discovered that Myra was Dad's half aunt and Gail's full aunt...so there's much more to the story than any of us had imagined.   I often wonder if Dad knew that his Dad's father wasn't James Woodland Snr, the grandfather that he knew, and that his father's birth n...

Monday 4 October 2020 was the 150th anniversary of the birth of the last child of James Cahill and his wife, Eliza Dunn.  Mary Ann Cahill was born on 4 October 1870 at Belford, near Singleton in NSW.  She was the eleventh child - although her birth certificate shows that she was the tenth of James and Eliza's children with 3 boys and 3 girls living and a son and two daughters deceased!    As many will recall, I've not been able to find a birth or baptismal registration for my great-grandmother Agnes, the ninth child, who was born about 1867.  I've not been able to locate birth and death registrations for the fifth child, Johanna (know also as Hannah and Minnie).   However, James and Eliza's death certificates both record there were eleven children with three dying as infants.  So here's the information that's been gathered on the children- Catherine was born on 15 April 1856 in East Maitland.  She died in Murrurundi on 21 January 1913.  She ...