The surname Whelan (and the variant Phelan) is an anglicised derivation of the Gaelic name O'Faolain. Unfortunately for family history researchers, Whelan is not a rare name, being the seventy-ninth most common in Ireland. If the Phelans are added, it moves to forty-fourth place, encompassing about 12,000 persons in Ireland.

According to McLysaght's Irish Families, most of the Whelan families came from around the south-east counties of Waterford, Kilkenny, Wexford and Carlow, their O'Faolain ancestors "having been Princes of the Decies before the Norman Invasion".

The oldest ancestor we have identified so far is Adam Whelan. On his children's birth certificates, Adam's own place of birth is shown as simply "Tipperary Ireland" or "County Tipperary". This leaves no clues to the town or parish involved. Searches of the parish records of Tipperary and Waterford had previously yielded no record of his birth or marriage, and his death certificate shows Adam's parents as "not known".

Fortunately, in mid-2010 I was contacted by another researcher who turned out to be a cousin through the marriage of one of Adam's daughters. My cousin's late father had some years earlier located the marriage of Adam Whelan and Mary McInerney, in Tipperary Parish, on 8 September 1853. A cautionary note: at least some of the Catholic diocesan records of baptisms and weddings prior to civil registration are considered to be church property and are not included in the online databases compiled by the Irish Family History Foundation. So one has to pay for a manual search of these records by the relevant centre.

According to the records from the Tipperary Family History Research centre, Adam was baptised in Tipperary (Catholic) parish on 31 December 1832 and his parents were James Whelan and Mary O'Brien. However the centre cannot find a record of any sibling baptisms, nor any record of Adam's parents' marriage. We may guess that the family had moved around a bit, which again makes things awkward. Further research needs to be done to try to learn more about Adam's family.

The family tradition that I had been told years ago was that in about 1853 Adam married Mary McInerney in Tipperary, whereupon Mary travelled to Melbourne and worked as a domestic servant for two years before Adam joined her.

The evidence of Adam's arrival in Melbourne is the passenger list for the clipper Schomberg which sailed from Liverpool on 6 October 1855 on its maiden voyage. Eighty-two days later, on Boxing Day, the westerly current grounded the vessel near Cape Otway in western Victoria, where it soon broke up. The passengers were transferred to other vessels and ferried to Melbourne. Adam Whelan is recorded as 24, single, labourer, Irish. The reference to him being single may have been a (reasonable) assumption by the official filling in the passenger list.

We can be fairly sure that the Tipperary marriage in 1853 is correct and given the rarity of the name "Adam Whelan" we may be confident that the 1832 birth is "our" Adam. Equally we can assume that the passenger on the Schomberg was our man; there is no other record of such a name in Victorian migration databases. It seems that the family tradition was accurate in relation to the marriage, and if the rest of the traditional story is also correct, then Mary must have left for Australia in late 1853 or 1854. Large numbers of young women, many of them orphaned or destitute, migrated from Ireland to Australia in the mid 1800s to escape poverty, encouraged by assisted-passage schemes with promises of employment as domestics. Mary possibly took advantage of such a scheme, though whether she travelled under her maiden or married name is unknown as searches of both names have not yet yielded a match. Adam travelled separately two years later as an "unassisted" passenger, meaning he had to pay his own fare. We may guess that the couple had decided to grasp an opportunity for a free berth to Australia for Mary while Adam worked to raise the fare for his own travel.

The couple's first child was conceived a few weeks after Adam's arrival in Melbourne and they lived in the West Melbourne area for the rest of their lives. Adam's occupation, as shown on most of the certificates of his children's births and deaths, and that of his own death certificate, is that of "laborer". One of his children's death certificates lists Adam as a "railway employee", others as a "bricklayer" or a "builder", and another (mistakenly) as a "farmer".

Although Adam's death certificate, and his children's birth certificates, all show his name simply as "Adam", the death certificates for several of his children show their father as "Adam Francis"; this may have been a confusion between Adam senior and his son Adam Francis.

Mary McInerney's origins are less clear. Her 1909 death certificate lists her parents as 'unknown McInerney" though her father's occupation is shown as "farmer". Whoever supplied the information for the certificate felt that Mary had married at age 15, which may or may not be correct. Searching for Mary's birth record is a difficult task as the name "McInerney" is capable of an almost infinite variety of spelling variants (some quite obscure), and the name "Mary" is hardly uncommon!

Adam and Mary's first child Michael Joseph was born in 1856, and the second child Patrick in 1858. Ten other children followed in the period 1859 to 1874 - six of them girls. All survived to adult-hood, though Bridget and Joseph both died in their twenties from tuberculosis, and the same disease took Adam junior in his mid thirties.

Adam and Mary Whelan died in their West Melbourne home in 1895 and 1909 respectively. They are buried together in the Melbourne General Cemetery, with their three unmarrried children (Bridget, Joseph, Thomas), in an unmarked plot.

My branch of the family descends from Adam and Mary's second son, Patrick Whelan. In 1884 Patrick married Margaret Clancy at St Mary's Catholic Church in West Melbourne; both were in their mid-twenties. Margaret was a daughter of Michael Clancy and Margaret Scanlan, who migrated to Melbourne from Spiddle near the town of Galway, Ireland, in about 1857. Margaret was apparently the first white woman born in the area of Keilor Plains, then very much bushland and now suburban Melbourne's Avondale Heights, on the banks of the Maribyrnong River.

Patrick and Margaret Whelan had eleven children - four of them girls. Their eighth child, Patrick, died in his early twenties, while the ninth child, Thomas, died in 1993 at the age of ninety-three. His mother Margaret had lived till her early nineties, whilst his father Patrick had passed eighty years of age. Patrick and Margaret are buried in Footscray Cemetery. Their sixth child Michael was my grandfather, who died in 1978.

Descendants chart

The descendant chart for the Whelan families is in PDF format here (NB - this chart has not yet been updated with Adam Whelan's birth and parents' names). For privacy reasons this chart excludes people born after about 1940.