I’ve previously shared details of my family tree and DNA research on this blog and earlier this year, a trip to Ireland with my dad sent me down a research rabbit hole that ended with me finding out that we’re related to a former Bolton Wanderers player.
Having supported Bolton Wanderers for as long as I can remember, this was both an exciting and surreal discovery, but I’ll take you back to the start.
My dad’s always wanted to visit Ireland and in particular Charlestown, County Mayo – the birthplace of his grandfather Patrick Molloy.
Although I’ve been to Ireland several times myself, I’ve never made it across to our ancestral home on the west side of the island, so when I got stuck into my research at the start of 2025, I made it a short-term goal to visit.
My step-mum (and my dad’s wife) generously booked a three-night trip for my dad’s 65th birthday, staying just over the Mayo-Sligo border at the Yeats County Inn, in Curry.
From my research, I knew that my great grandfather Patrick was the eldest of six Molloy children born to Thomas and Maria Molloy, in Charlestown, in the early 1900s.
Three of his siblings – Lucy, Bridget and Dominick – emigrated to New York in the 1920s. Patrick, meanwhile, made the shorter journey across the Irish Sea to Bolton.
However, Patrick’s youngest sister Theresa (also known as Tess) stayed in Charlestown for quite some time, getting married to a local man named Anthony Mulligan and having several kids, before eventually leaving and settling in Plymouth.
Prior to our visit to Mayo, my dad remembered a long road trip down to the south west of England in his youth and recalled his grandad mentioning his sister Tess but knew no other real details about his great aunt or that side of the family.
During the trip, we visited a couple of local cemeteries to see if we could find any Molloys but these were very few and far between. It was only when we had a chance meeting with a local named Martin Doherty in Murray’s pub that we had a bit of a breakthrough.
Martin told us that he remembered ‘Tony and Tess’ well. He said that Anthony Mulligan had married into the Molloy family and that his family used to run Mulligan’s butcher shop on Church Street.
We were incredibly buoyed by this bit of information but it was only when we got back to our hotel that things really started to escalate.
Mick, the owner, heard my dad and I talking about Mulligans and asked us our own name. He confirmed that Molloy wasn’t an all-too-common name in that area (he only knew of one who lived in nearby Gowel) but he said he had a good friend also called Anthony Mulligan.
Amazingly, Anthony came to the hotel to meet us both and even rang his uncle Francie. Francie told me that his dad’s brother was called Anthony ‘Tony’ Mulligan and married Tess Molloy before moving to England. He also mentioned that they had several children and reeled off a few of their names, which matched the research I’d previously done.
Although this was already more than enough for us, Anthony then kindly rang his sister Karen who now lives in his family’s old butcher shop, after it was converted into a home on an episode of RTÉ show ‘Room to Improve’. Karen then invited us both round to her lovely house to have a look at a few family photos.
This made me incredibly keen to dig into that side of the family once I got back home, in particular Tess and Tony’s descendents, which is what brings me to the Bolton Wanderers connection.
After quite a bit of digging, I discovered that one of Tess and Tony’s daughters had four children.
Research on sites such as Ancestry will only take you so far and the trail will go cold after a certain point, because records only go up to a certain date due to data protection. So I took to Facebook and found an account for Tess and Tony’s daughter.
Fortunately, there were a few public posts on this page but not so many that I had to scroll for ages. One that stopped me in my tracks was a post-match interview with a footballer that I recognised very well – it was former Bolton Wanderers striker Joe Mason in his Wolverhampton Wanderers days.
I went back to my family tree to double check the names of the four aforementioned children and there it was – Joseph Mason, born in Plymouth, in 1991. Incredibly it turns out that Joe Mason happens to be Tess and Tony’s grandson, and in turn my dad’s second cousin.
A lot of people may not find that very interesting but for me, as both a huge Bolton Wanderers fan and someone interested in genealogical research, finding out that we’re related to an ex-Wanderer (and not even that distantly) is very satisfying.
Do you have any ‘famous’ relatives? Let me know in the comments
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