Randolph Mahoney
Randolph Mahoney was born on 20 December 1799, in Maryland by the 1850 census. By 1823 he was in Fairfield County, Ohio, where he married Polly Reed on 18 December that year. Their son John B. was born there in December 1828.
In 1835 the family settled in what became Okaw township, in Shelby County, Illinois. On 31 October 1838 he bought the west half of the southwest quarter of section 8, township 9 north, range 4 east, from the government. In 1850 the household held his wife Polly, born in Ohio, and a ten-year-old daughter Henrietta, born in Illinois.
He was the township's preacher. The county history of 1881 remembered him in one sentence: "Randolph Mahony, who settled here in 1835, was a brother, in the name of the Lord, who inclined to the doctrines of Methodism and taught the same to the early settlers, going from house to house, so that none could complain or find an excuse for waywardness." His gravestone calls him Rev. Randolph Mahoney and is carved with an open book at the top.
His son John B. Mahoney enlisted at Shelbyville on 15 August 1862 in Company K of the 126th Illinois Infantry, aged thirty-three, a farmer, born in Fairfield County, Ohio. He was mustered out at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in July 1865 and died in April 1873, two years before his father.
Randolph died on 2 June 1875, aged seventy-five years and five months, and is buried in the Mahoney Cemetery in Shelby County. Polly outlived him by six years.
The Maryland birth is the useful part. Maryland was the one English colony founded for Catholics, and Irish Catholic families settled there in numbers generations before the famine crossings of the 1840s. A Mahoney born there in 1799 belongs to that older migration, not to the one most Americans picture when they hear the name.
Children
Henrietta Mahoney (b. 1840)
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Randolph Mahoney (1799-1875)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/randolph-mahoney-1799-1875-6c2553.