The Legacy
The people behind the cats.
A Tribute
This website is a tribute to Richard Cullen, Sherman Ross, and all the other Manx rights activists who have worked to keep the breed as pure and respectable as possible.
Richard Cullen
The oldest pedigree still on this site is Mickey's — GC RW Cilgerran Mickleann O’Flynn, born on 26 December 1985, bred and owned by Dick Cullen. By the 1990s the same pedigrees name the breeder as R & R Cullen, and it is R & R Cullen who are credited as the authors of this website on every archived version of it.
With Sherman Ross he wrote The Manx Syndrome Myth: The Myths & The Truth, the article that is still the most-read thing on this site and the reason it is worth keeping online. It set out to replace rumour about Manx syndrome with something a buyer could actually rely on.
He is in a good many of the photographs here, usually holding a cat at a show bench: with Mickey Finn, with O’Hylygh, with Paddy, and with Aida more than once. His own website, on another of his interests entirely, is still up at w0mnx.com.
Sherman Ross
Sherman Ross, BS Eng.Phy., MS Ed, was President of the American Manx Club and the co-author of The Manx Syndrome Myth.
He and Sandra Ross bred under the Tahame name, and their cats are not a footnote to the Blarney story but part of its bloodline. CH Tahame’s Shamen, DM, born in 1978, and CH, GP Tahame’s Mocha, born in 1980, both appear in Blarney pedigrees — Shamen sired Mocha, and Mocha is Mickey’s paternal grandmother. Both are in the Hall of Champions, marked as what they are.
So the two men who wrote the article together were also breeding cats that ended up in one another’s pedigrees. That is the part of this history the paperwork records better than any of the prose does.
The Clubs
Every cat on this site is registered with the Cat Fanciers’ Association, whose numbers run through all the pedigrees here.
Two clubs were on manxcats.com before they were anywhere else. The American Manx Club and Rocky Mountain Cat Fanciers, Inc. both had their web pages hosted here, and both eventually left for domains of their own — the pages that remain in the archive are the ones that said so, pointing visitors onward. Neither of those addresses is linked here: one no longer exists, and the other has since been taken over by an organisation with nothing to do with cats.
What the Records Show
These are the dates the pedigrees and the old pages actually carry. They are not the whole story — when the cattery was founded, and when it stopped, are not written down anywhere on this site.
- 1978 CH Tahame’s Shamen, DM is born to Sherman and Sandra Ross — the earliest dated cat in any Blarney pedigree.
- 1980 CH, GP Tahame’s Mocha is born, also to the Rosses. She becomes Mickey’s paternal grandmother.
- 1985 GC RW Cilgerran Mickleann O’Flynn — Mickey — is born on 26 December, bred by Dick Cullen.
- 1992 GC, GP Blarney’s O’Dair Twbe Dfrnt is born, bred by R & R Cullen.
- 1994 CH Blarney’s Micklainey of Lakatail is born, by Mickey out of CH Cilgerran Malarkey of Blarney.
- 1995 GC, BW Blarney’s Fidjit O’Furrley is born.
- 1997 manxcats.com is counting visitors by August, and is hosting the American Manx Club and Rocky Mountain Cat Fanciers pages.
At the Bench
