The eldest daughter Elizabeth (b 1817) married Charles Binns (b c1814), a member of a prominent Quaker family, in 1839. Charles was the son of Jonathan Binns, a Liverpool-born land agent and surveyor living in Lancaster. Charles became manager of a coal and iron mine in Clay Cross, Derbyshire, which had been established by George Stephenson (and of which Sir Joshua was a director), producing coal for transportation by his own railway. Elizabeth had four children (all girls) but then seems to have died in the early 1850s. Charles died in 1887.
Little is known about Sir Joshua’s eldest son Joshua (b 1819). He joined the Army and attained the rank of captain. He lived in southern Africa for many years and served as a border agent in Natal on the Zulu frontier. His account of his travels formed the basis of a book by his younger brother Hugh Mulleneux, The Ruined Cities of Zulu Land.
The next son Hugh Mulleneux (b 1822) also had an exotic career. He too joined the Army, including time with the 25th Bengal Native Infantry, and then volunteered to join the Bashi Bazouks, an unsavoury formation of irregulars in the service of the Ottoman Empire. In due course he rose to the Ottoman rank of colonel. On his eventual return to England in about the mid 1850s he penned a succession of volumes, including several describing his own extensive travels on military service, a biography of his late father and also some adventure novels. He married Angelina Skey (b 1826) in 1870 and took up residence near his father in Hampshire.
James Mulleneux (b 1826), by contrast, became a civil engineer. In the 1850s he was lodging and working in Derbyshire. His Egstow address suggests he was involved with coal mining. He died in 1867 aged 41 and was buried with his sisters at St Mary’s, Edge Hill.
Emily (b 1830) became the second wife of William Ballantyne Hodgson (b 1815), a noted teacher, newspaper proprietor and academic. Hodgson was employed at the new Mechanics’ Institution (later Liverpool Institute) when Sir Joshua was mayor (and Emily but a child) and went on to become its Principal. He married Emily in 1863 and they mostly lived in London till Hodgson was appointed the first Professor of Political Economy in Edinburgh University in 1871. After he died in 1880, Emily stayed on in Edinburgh with their two children (one son and one daughter).
The youngest daughter Adah (b 1839) married a Welsh banker, William Williams, in 1866. They went to live in Merionethshire and had at least two daughters. Adah possibly died as early as 1876.