HISTORIOGRAPHY

Although families tend to maintain a certain part of their history through the retelling of stories, this present work really finds its foundations in the work of John V. Moher and the team of those who worked with him on the 1984 Moher Reunion and the Family History Project led by John Paul Bradford. Without the hours of research conducted by these two groups, the information presented here could not have been pulled together.

John V. Moher conducted research into the Moher family for about twenty years, from the mid-1970's to the mid-1990's. He produced an unpolished worksheet in 1977 which was a rough list of the descendants of William Moher(1). This was refined into the 1984 Moher Reunion booklet which differed from the 1977 work in many of its details. John developed the belief that almost all of the North American Mohers could be traced back to William Moher(1). The crowning achievement of his work was the huge 1984 Moher Reunion. He assembled a group of people to help him organise the event which brought hundreds of people to the Douro Community Centre. The following is a description of the reunion written by Frank Hutton, whose mother was Kathleen Moher the daughter of Daniel James Moher:

But the highlight of the trip was the family reunion in D[ou]ro, Ont., just outside Peterborough.
When your mother's name was Moher - like mine was - that can be an event of major proportions.
You see, William Moher of County Cork planned to join the Peter Robinson expedition to homestead in D[ou]ro Township in 1825 but fell ill. And, when his health had failed to improve by 1832, his wife Mary decided to make the journey with eight of the children, leaving one daughter at home to care for her father.
Now, as you can appreciate, in the intervening 152 years, good Irish stock like that can develop a very bushy family tree.
Mind you, the whole family didn't show up for the reunion. Barely 700 of us arrived in the tiny village of D[ou]ro (pop. 250) to register in the community hall, coming from all parts of Canada and the far-flung corners of the U.S.
D[ou]ro may never recover!
There were a lot of cousins there I hadn't seen since moving to Edmonton in 1946, and a whole bunch more that I never knew existed.
But everybody had a wooden name disc, hanging by a cord around the neck - the color of the cord indicating from which of Mary Moher's eight children he or she descended.
The name discs, which I think were a terrific idea, were wafer-thin slices of branches cut from ironwood trees growing on the original Moher homestead. As a matter of fact, the O'Brien family, current owners of the property, set up a sign at the gate, inviting Mohers to visit the old homestead.
Anyway, the fun was in trying to establish how one was related to the chap from Virginia and the woman from El Paso, and whether one was actually a kissin' cousin of the gorgeous gal from Toronto. And with only a weekend to make the rounds, I'm sure I must have missed a few of the 700-odd in attendance.
AND FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH you'll be pleased to know that, despite having that many Irishmen in one hall at one time, there was not a single wee bit of unpleasantness of any kind.
Which only proves, I should think, that blood is thicker than Bushmills.


The 1984 Moher Reunion booklet contained a brief description of the then current version of the Moher immigration to Canada (referred to as "the other story" in the vita of William Moher(1) above). The majority of the book, however, was a long list of descendents of William Moher(1) to the fourth generation. It provides a snap shot of John's research on the family to that time. Some lines are complete and others are clearly indicated as untraced or untraceable.

The Family History Project began in 1991 as an attempt to reconstruct the ancestors of John Frederick Bradford and his wife Catherine Ellen Moher (Bradford). It is therefore concerned with much more than the Moher line. The project, however, has a wider mandate than simply genealogy. It has been designed to create a true family history. The work of John V. Moher on the genealogical background of the Moher family in Canada has been incorporated into a general Moher family history. The chief researcher and the author of this present work is John Paul Bradford. Both John V. Moher and John Paul Bradford are direct descendents of William Moher(1).

Building on the work of John V. Moher, the Family History Project conducted research on the Mohers' original lot in Douro at the Ontario Archives. The assessments of the township and the various censuses of Canada have provided many additional details and have allowed some additional work to be completed on the list of descendants. Local newspapers and directories have also provided some important details.

This internet site, established in late 1998, is an extension of the efforts outlined above. Initial response has been positive with a number of links being made and a number of researchers posting their information.