Welcome To The Site
Hello, My name is Joseph Cox.
The purpose of this site is to preserve the many families and their allied members through sound genealogical practice including but not limited to:
- Obtaining pictures and documents related to the our families.
- Providing pictures and documents free of charge to family members.
- Obtaining source documentation instead of being a collector of names.
- Teaching the value of interviewing family members.
- Teaching the value of preserving source documentation for future generations.
- Keeping in touch with our family members.
History
When my great-grandmother died in 1992 so did a bunch of family “secrets”. Luckily, she never threw anything out as she was conditioned from living through WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII to keep everything. Unfortunately, my family was not close-knit. Bitter divorces as well as alcoholism took its toll on the family. Since my great-grandmother never threw out anything, I came across a great treasure trove of pictures, documents, and other memorabilia in her attic. We were never allowed to go up in the attic as children and was always told it was haunted. It is now that I know it was haunted with memories of ghosts past.
With this new-found information I was able to piece my mother’s side of my family together. Since my parents had divorced and I had not seen my father since I was a very young child, I came across a brick wall on my father’s side. I stopped researching for a few years and did not pick it up again until my first child was born in 1998. Around that time my mother-in-law presented me with a bunch of family photos and information on her family (Hutchinson) and my father-in-law’s family (Mullis).
I became motivated to research again so that my children would know of their history, if not on my side, then on their mother’s side. As I started researching the Mullis family I found this was not a well known name. I conversed online around 2001 with Barbara Philemon Culp. She was a distant cousin of my wife and did tons of research and provided me with her book “The Mullis Melange”.
Unfortunately, Barbara was ill when we wrote each other. She was excited that I was researching the Mullises and thrilled to learn that my wife was the niece of her friend Flory Mullis. Barbara had dedicated her book to Flory.
Barbara was also excited that I was putting a website together with the Mullis data that she provided. At that time, the site was called MullisMelange.com then changed to MulliFamily.com. I have since settled on OurBigClan.com.
I lost touch with Barbara and did not know what became of her. Her address had changed and her emails went unanswered. Unfortunately I learned of her passing through an online obituary. I have put it up on this site and can be seen here.
I used her book as a basis for my research and she kept me motivated to push forward. I never expected to get this addicted to genealogy and it reach out this far to the Mullis family.
Correcting Mistakes
The goal of this site is to research the Mullis and allied family lines as well as to create a community of family members and fellow researchers to discuss the genealogy of these lines. The database section is a culmination of my personal research and contributions from other family researchers. I try my best to give credit to everyone that contributes as well as make sure the data is sourced. If you happen to find mistakes in the database please contact me on the contact link below or above and provide the source so I can correct these.
Contact
Privacy
I work very hard on keeping living data away from the general public. If you find data of living people open to the general public please notify me so I can correct it. This does not mean names.
Please Help:
Look through your attics and closets! Did you know that valuable genealogical material may be rotting away in your closets, attics or garages. You may have packed up a beloved relatives belongings when they passed away and have not gone through it since then. If you are reading this, now is the time to go through these valuables.
It’s amazing what gets ruined or thrown away every day that may be evidence to your existence or a relatives’ existence on this earth. Most people think these things may not be valuable to anyone. The things you may think is trash could be gold nuggets waiting to be discovered to those researching our family.
If you are related to me in some way or think you may be please contact me before you throw anything out that is from a deceased family member that you may think is trash or not valuable to anyone. More than likely it is a valuable document or picture that our family would love to have and share with the rest of the family.