Growing up I was told that my dad was the only child of an only child and as such we weren't related to any other O'Briens. What a surprise it was to discover oodles of O'Briens not very far away in the family tree and many of them formerly based in Marrickville, my home of many years.
It is true that my dad was an only child (and so was his mother) but his father, Wilfred, grandfather John Michael and great grandfather, Thomas O'Brien, all came from large families with many and varied branches of relatives to uncover and with fascinating stories to unearth.
This blog attempts to summarise my findings. A lot of the information has been found through newspaper articles on Trove. While I have tried to fix the scanning errors, many remain and I will never publish if I wait until they are perfect. The text is a considerable improvement on the raw scanned data.
I have linked to WikiTree to indicate the family relationships in detailed tree form and have embellished those with stories, original documents and photos here in the blog.
Navigate to different branches of my family tree from the INDEX page.
