Welsh Research 2008-2021

There have been a number of times when there really hasn’t been anyone else who has researched the family I’m researching. I really like this. This was especially the case for my four Dibben sisters of Sturminster Newton and a lot of the families I researched back in the 1990s. There are a surprising number of cases where people don't leave a Will, and there is nothing much about them online: I am thinking of two instances involving Michigan and New Brunswick. There was nothing regarding my forebear Nathaniel Gee until I decided to make his ancestry public. Most of my paternal side have been a struggle with only irrelevant material on trees.

I usually think if a couple married before 1911 they and their issue will appear on several trees, but often seemingly not. Going the other way, if people are researching backwards, the kind souls who work out the maiden names of the female forebears are doing us all a favour. However when it comes to Wales, confusion can spread like wildfire.

It does rather get my goat when people say they are relying on a tree, or cannot verify your findings from a tree, or cite some not very good tree, or a wrong tree. So I end up working for years, ‘burrowing away in the darkness’ painstakingly making connections between a person listed in one record, and a person listed in another record. By far the most pains being taken relate to my Welsh line, my only real Welsh line.

Despite the strong Celtic rotos I possess, there are some anomalies. My maternal side houses more Irish lines than my paternal Irish line. We have the Urches, Edwards, Richards, Kellys, Bells, Woodsides in Waterford, Wexford, Meath, Coleraine, Bangor and Dublin (via Galway).

Similarly a few of my English lines made it to Wales, take a bow: Lloyd, Evans, Blowers, Davis, Pittard, Harding and Whitehead at Bangor, Wrexham, Aberystwyth, Orielton, Port Talbot, Tonyrefail and Llanwrst. Plus some of my Cornish folk who were raised in south Wales ended up in to Montgomery and more deliberately in Deeside.

The port of Haverfordwest is approximately the site of my main Welsh line, but aside from a possibile illegitimacy in 1776, and the extraordinary wiggle down to the Medway (a young DNA match), I really cannot be said to have discovered anything at all. The location of any incidents was often somewhere quite far from Wales.

Back in 2008, when this tale begins, I had a notion that there were layers of ancestry yet to be to be explored, and which were beyond my kenning. The basecamp for any further research back in time was Merthyr Tydfil: very much in the centre of my kaleidoscope, blocking the view.

Ancestry and FindMyPast had been building up their census collections for awhile, and in 2008 I figured out (duh) that Blanche Morton (born 1812) might have some Morton relatives in the 1841 census for the area where she lived. The last counties from 1851 were released on FindMyPast in November 2009, completing its run of census returns, as an Office of Fair Trading report the same year writes. Indeed there were Mortons in Merthyr, including Blanche's mother who lives on past 1851 giving her birthplace as Bassaleg, Monmouthshire. An Evans from Bassaleg equals Welsh research. We can begin.

I was not brave enough to tackle the Evanses in any depth. My research was saved from extinction by new aunt Mary Evans (born 1790) marrying a second time in the Victorian era, was late enough to name her father and confirm her first marriage back around Waterloo. I had a gentle struggle through her offspring, but failed to take account of two couples in this huge parish, and consequently found too late that not all the children were ‘mine’. For a while I believe Mrs Evans attained the age of 100, but that was the other wife. This was a mess I didn't spot or untangle and has been quietly forgotten. Mercifully I came to a graceful pause on this line, as the summer of 2008 had me preoccupied with my Northcountry story which gave as good as it got for several months straight.

At this point I would not have described myself as possessing any Welsh knowledge. My efforts were cursory and it’s painfully apparent, the Evans tree is among my least thrilling efforts.

The cost of one of my favourite research tools, the copy Will, rose from £5 to £10 by August 2009. I had really run out of patience with paying £10 per head per Will per person per copy per wait per inconvenience per disappointment per regret. I clocked that the wills were actually available in Kensington, just sitting there on permanent loan on an array of microfilms. These microfilms had been accurately catalogued but in such a way that no sane human could jump to the right film unaided. I asked the director if she’d like me to write a program to make the process easier. She was kind enough to say that this would be nice. Mostly of course I wanted to make the process harder – anything that meant the user had to look up a reference in a table, and cross-reference that with a second table added to the fun. Of course the computer does the looking up but the activity still occurs: delicious. I made a list of microfilms to consult for wills held across the available period 1858-1925 and saved myself a good deal of money. In July 2019 I would be ordering 97 wills in one day, when the price dropped overnight, but that’s still ten years away.

Regrettably, a few days prior to this plan being implemented, I had succumbed and bought Elizabeth Morton’s Will (1859) for ten whole pounds and this came by post a few days later. I think it would have been better value if it had never arrived. At least I’d have got some mileage out of the suspense. I had hoped that she’d reveal hitherto unknown relatives, but the Reveal showed just some very known relatives: the feeling rankled. There was nothing more to do on the Morton side. Perhaps the parish registers for Cadoxton-juxta-Neath could be combed through for the unit at Glamorgan Archives, but I was in no hurry to go there, particularly not just to look at a baptism for a known child in a known place. So, you would correctly conclude that my Welsh research was non-existent. I had no plans to do much more with that line, wasn’t a great fan of ‘going backwards’ anyway, and had plenty else to keep me busy.

The next pertinent activity was huge, game-changing, but one of chance. One evening after work (2010) I found some great pre-1858 wills for my Norfolk forebears and was soon keen to see the corresponding death duty records in the IR26 series. Before the family records centre closed in 2008, I had completed a survey explaining how much I used IR26 records – in effect they were a proxy for a will index in the era when each diocese had its own court, and pre-1858 wills were deposited countrywide through record offices. Having written the program to find district wills the previous summer, I decided to do something similar for death duty records. It was a case of going through all the IR26 reels and putting the details of their contents into a table. Mayhap there was a ‘guide’ on the shelves with this task already done, but there was certainly nothing online, so I created one. In June 2010 I went into TNA with my bag of lookups for post-1858 wills (Lain, Gibson, Harvey). Just for fun I included Elizabeth Morton, the terrible will from the previous year.  It may be sour grapes, but she got included. Little did I know my entire Welsh experience depended on this casual inclusion.

At 1pm on 5 June 2010 in the National Archives, Kew,, I open the IR26 death duty volume for Miss Morton, our not very Welsh-sounding link-person. I find these cryptic scribbled words: "This estate takes £100 of E Pengilly WR3.25.5/5 for W27564/60".

Seven hours later I have the Eureka! moment, about 8pm at night, when I downloaded the Will of Elizabeth Pengilly from the National Archives. Nothing will be quite the same again...

I had known of Elizabeth’s nephew “Thomas Pengelly Morton” but as Pengelly is a Cornish name, I’d concluded the family were just friendly neighbours who did something worthy of a boy being named in their honour. But the above scribble in relation to Thomas’s aunt suggests otherwise: a Will had been left. Not many people of this name were leaving Wills. Fifteen to twenty minutes of Googling on my return to the flat led me to Brian Wagstaffe’s pages. The incredibly hardworking Mr Wagstaffe (‘Waggy’), a local man, had passed away six years prior, but his pages had been kept going by Rootsweb, and I am very grateful for that. Waggy’s pages listed: Will of Elizabeth Pengilly , Widow of Neath Abbey 12 July 1825.

The timings was off. 2011 and 2011 were extremely busy years. There was no opportunity for reflection: changing jobs, helping with a youth organisation, running the marathon, studying, plotting my next move overseas and managing the distractions of London. Ten years later I have an opportunity to do a timeline, a belated research diary, and it makes sense now to focus on the Welsh family, as you’ll see.

In the Will dated about 1825, Elizabeth Pengilly had confessed to being the aunt of Elizabeth Morton and thus great-aunt of my Blanche. But she threw in two curve balls in the shape of a brother "Morgan Rees" and a niece "Mary Evans", wife of a plumber and glazier. I did the best I could, muddling through, and finding nothing much, over the next few months.

I was preoccupied with all the rest of my family trees, and had wanted to let the new Welsh material sink in. 180 letters were written on various lines between 2009-2011, a busy period. At Christmas, I resolved to study my Cornish-Welsh kin, the Taylors. This involved fighting a lot of dragons, but thanks to being a quick learner, I was getting somewhere. I knew what worked. After 'cracking' the Taylor family, a gathering was brooked for late July 2011. I decided to make a few days of it, and again, whether by happenstance or no, I planned to ‘throw in’ a morning at Archifau Morgannwg (likely Tuesday 27 July). I was very scared of the records, as I knew they would be old, unindexed and with perhaps little clues to differentiate between individuals and to figure out who anyone was.

The gathering went well, and the follow-up days camping at Cwmdare and hunting records in Merthyr, were both informative. It was now time to visit Archifau Morgannwg in the capital city. My fears about the parish records were grounded. But I was luckier than most, as I had names, just now needed to figure out the relationships. Fortunately there was an index, and I was able to track back from Elizabeth Pengilly (born about 1766) through two marriages to her maiden name of Morgan, and then find that the baptism in 1766 (to father Griffith and un-named mother) fitted her best, as Griffith not only had another daughter Ann (my forebear), but had married a Mrs Jennet Rees (presumably the mother of Morgan Rees, the ‘brother’ of Elizabeth). We can now conclude that Morgan Rees must have had a different father, one Morgan Rees, and this information from junior's baptism indicated he was born posthumously. So there was a window of a few years for possible older children of Mr Rees and Jennet to be born. I made a note of some. The mother’s are not listed in the registers at all. I could see Gwenllian and Catherine Rees baptised around 1750 were potential half-siblings and there were marriages and possible children for them both. How exciting! I found a borderline-convincing entry of marriage for Elizabeth Pengilly’s favourite niece Mary, to become Mrs Mary Evans, but no baptism for her. Garr this was not easy! Panic rose in my research organ as the clock was ticking and I needed to do a massive search: a massive search of Cadoxton and possibly Neath too for any children of Mrs Mary Evans getting married. Fortunately they would have the distinctive words ‘glazier’ or ‘plumber and glazier’ listed for father’s occupation so the hunt was on. As a mildly unenthused clerk (2011) warned, time was disappearing. But then up pops Catherine Evans, father Plumber and glazier, who was shown as marrying in 1842, just eighteen months into the search. My day was done. Now just the thorny challenge of getting the images onto a memory stick and slumping in the National Express coach back to London. So ended Tuesday.

Wednesday morning saw me make a light and lazy breakfast, yawn, look out my attic window at blue sky – Canary Wharf visible in the distance – and turn my attention to more immediate matters: 1780s Glamorganshire. Now that I knew some of the characters' identities, I checked their names against the LLGC catalogue to see who left wills. Nobody! I did notice howeover, that Jennet Morgan, the matriarch of the tribe, had letters of administration for her estate. In this case there were two interesting-looking sureties for the administration: William Cook (farmer) and David Thomas (clockmaker). These days they would be known as FAN (friends associates neighbours). I was just plain nosy and followed them up. This nasal intervention paid off, as Mrs Cook (widow of William), for whatever reason, left her estate equally between four people, whom I was forced to hypothesise were siblings: (Captain) Rees Rees, Gwenllian Rees (Mrs William), Catherine Rees (Mrs Smith) and Morgan Rees (jr). Note that Mrs Cook really can’t be bothered with Jennet’s younger children. I had no real idea what she was up to, but I was grateful. It was much nicer working from Mrs Cook’s list than guessing the connection from old registers

The hitherto unknown Rees Rees, now revealed as the eldest child was the one I hadn’t been able to lock down at Archifau Morgannwg. I hadn’t tried too hard. I mean as a name, I was a bit floored by him to be honest. So I could stitch on Rees Rees baptised 11 June 1748 son of Morgan Rees, to the rapidly progressing family quilt. Looking at the inventory for the siblings we had:

1. Rees Rees (1748), listed as Captain of the barque Eliza Ann. More work to do
2. Gwenllian Rees, Mrs William. Known to be mother of Mary Evans, wife of the plumber and glazier. Herself had a daughter Catherine Ace (thanks to that marriage of 1842 naming the father and his occupation). More work to do.
3. Catherine Rees, Mrs Smith. After her fisherman husband died, she had a posthumous son, William Smith. He grew up to exhibit nice handwriting and to witness family documents but was otherwise frustrating me as there was not enough proof to assign him to any of the several possibles in the area. More work to do.
4. Morgan Rees. Had thoughtful appeared in one of the very few books on display at Archifau Morgannwg (2011): his tombstone at Neath had been transcribed and seemed to indicate he had two sons that survived past 1841 in the area.
5. Ann Morgan, Mrs Morton. She was my line and there wasn’t much more to say about that.
6. David Morgan. Completely unknown. Genuine panic sets in when I think of where he might have gone. Absolutely anywhere. Not going to touch him at all.
7. Illegitimate daughter of Mr Morgan. She is baptised after her mother had already died, and five years before her father marries Mrs Rees. I have a quick look but suspect she is adopted locally or possibly collected by a family member from West Wales with a view to her growing up there. Not going to bother pursuing her.
8. Elizabeth Morgan. She led us into the maze to begin with, by marrying factory superintendent Pengilly as her second husband, and leaving enough spondulicks to niece Elizabeth that got the Stamp Office interested 35 years later; and me, 150 years after that. She is 18 years younger than her eldest sibling, Rees Rees.

I begin with Rees Rees and eventually work out he too left a Will proven at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury just as his sister E. Pengilly would do a dozen years later. Both, in an ironic twist, feature on the webpage Brian Wagstaffe had put together, he’s just 26 rows below her on the same page.

Next we have Catherine Rees. Her only child William Smith appears to be listed in a Chancery case in 1810 in respect of the will of William Cook of Margam – that FAN person we saw earlier. It appears FAN can cut both ways. Chancery cases are not much fun, particularly if your name is William, as we shall see.

Eldest girl Gwenllian Rees’s has a grandchild Catherine Evans (her of the last-minute marriage find) who deserves our acclaim for actually being traceable despite common names, mothers not being listed on baptisms and some baptisms not being listed at all (her mother, Mary’s, is missing). However the good news ends there, as despite us going from Evans to Ace to Dobbs and to a very fancy pottery and glassware store in Cardiff High Street, and an interesting diversion to a lace exhibition in Exeter… she has No Living Descendants! We are down on our uppers, with no place to go. Gwenllian is not getting unlocked this easy. Believe it or not five years will need to go by, before we get our big break on this line.

And so this breathless Wednesday morning turns into a soggy afternoon, and it’s time to see the streets of Harringay. I definitely deserve a Turkish yogurtlu adana, and it’s highly probably that I will have one. ~~~I give away most of my books, box up my possessions and head abroad. ~~~

It’s Summer 2012 and the living is easy. My teaching programme has paused and I am allowed days and days at the gambling paradise that is Batumi, on the border with Turkey in the State of Sakartvelo. I do not want days and days in Batumi: I appreciated the chance to buy knitting equipment in a back street but this particular visit is on sufferance. In the American Library, the black formica tables gleam as several of us sit around reading. I am about to solve a big Welsh puzzle, although I am many miles and years from the place in question.

Jennet Rees (born about 1783) was one of the four daughters of Morgan Rees jr: named after her grandmother, the matriarch and first Jennet. By some counting methods there will be 14 Jennets in the family tree. I could not find this one: she had disappeared completely. So I envisioned that she’d had a child, a boy? Could that boy be given the names Morgan Rees, for his father? It seemed so. There was such a boy – two of them in fact. The first was her sister’s child, and the second was her own. Both were baptised Morgan Rees Price and the first died, as did his mother, while the second did not. Jennet had taken her deceased sister’s husband - against the law! Together they run a number of pubs including the Lamb and Flag at Glynneath. She had in fact married him, but as ‘Jane Reece’ in the big city of Bristol 80 miles to the east. No wonder I couldn’t find her. Back in England in 2013 I track down her descendant called Ann Jennet, in Gloucestershire and we have a good catch-up. Slowly I am getting confident at the Welsh work, and am beginning to know what I am looking for. I should point out that there is not a single online tree or any such assist, to aid me in my work. It’s cold turkey, all the way. The following summer I get wrapped up with researching the Dibbens from Somersetshire. There is lots of work on finding descendants on all kinds of lines. Wales waits.

In October 2014, I go down to Kew to transcribe as much as I can of the Chancery case where William Smith is ostensibly put on trial in 1810 for how he ‘managed’ the estate of William Cook. The phrase 'no idea where the rest of the money went' appears as does the rather jolly 'unlawful confederacy'. William Cook was a character familiar to today’s members of the opposition, a wealthy man racking up multiple children by multiple women. In this case his wife his childless. The farm is absolute chaos, and W. Smith is the only person keeping the show on the road. As far as can be seen Smith only survives the chancery case a couple of years, likely a shadow of his former self. Although we do learn the lovely tidbit that Mrs Pengilly made mourning clothing for her siblings' late uncle. I attack the Cambrian index one more time, learning a few snippets, and on Wikipedia find this vivid episode, that: HMS Dragon in October 1810 ran into and dismasted our Brig the Eliza Ann (master Rees) at the Hamoaze (mouth of Tamar) which vessel had been running from Neath to London. Poor uncle Rees!

In December 2015, I subject the parish registers of St Ishmael, Carmarthenshire to a full study, for my likely forebears, back to the 1500s. This is deeply diverting for a short time. They are the oldest surviving parish registers in south Wales.

In July 2016, I do battle with Catherine Smith, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and could easily be mistaken (by me) for an illegitimate child of the widowed Catherine Smith (formerly Rees), born in about 1785 and deceased before any surviving census. The younger Catherine, despite marrying a Hogg at Sully in Glamorgan (which her ‘brother’ William had done) is nothing to do with it. This is eventually established thanks to following her around the country to Cornwall to Newcastle, where there’s an exceptionally useful 1841 census return, and then up some more to Pitlivie, county Angus, where she is baptised in 1785. So she is not a member of our Rees family from the Neath valley.

 In August 2016, I pen the article “Creating Speculative Searches to Find Missing Records Online”, and a goodly number of these are from my Welsh ancestry. In regard to the Neath valley kin, I briefly mention Jennet Rees (the granddaughter), having had the son Morgan Rees Price. This technique is clearly on my mind.

In September 2016, I get the ball rolling and try to smoke out one Eleanor Jenkins from her lair. She had married my relative as her third partner in Aberdare in 1866 and was really baffling me, just popping up in the odd census thirty years apart. The goodly folks at RootsChat found that she was sometimes Elender or Ellen with variant ages and locations and her husband was misrecorded (where present) as Thomas! I sent a letter off to one of her descendants in London a little while later.

In November 2016, I reapply my own methology, creating a speculative search for a child of another Jennet, this time Jennet William, the oldest of the grandchildren (and sister of the disappointing Mary Evans plumber-and-glazier-wife where all our hard work came to naught). I wondered if she might have had a son called Anthony, as this name worked really hard on that corner of the family tree. Guess what? She did. Finally I am able to take Gwenllian Rees’s children down past 1800 in a line that might actually survive. This is the biggest break in years. Bashing my head against a wall had worked.

In February 2017, I am so privileged to get a letter and contact from cousin Ennis in Neath. She was put onto me by the third cousin of hers in London. She descends from my Mortons of Abercanaid, so it’s not long before I introduce Ennis to these earlier Morgan, Rees families in the Neath valley. She humours me and we have a great exchange, sharing whatever particulars emerge.

In February 2017, I finally pen a blog about Jennet Rees (the granddaughter) and her elopement with Jenkin Price in Bristol, before their triumphal return to the public house at Glynneath. Ennis adds a helpful comment regarding geography, as I had misread the bridegroom’s place of residence (‘Glenhenwye’ rather than the clever half-truth of Glyntawe).

In February 2017, I confess that I have stalled with my progress taking Gwenllian Rees (born 1751)’s descendants down to the present day. An early ‘win’ was the Welsh journalist and author Jessie Phillips Morris, but the rest of them are eluding me. Until today. By searching Ancestry trees for Catherine Lewis born about 1821 in Merthyr Tydfil, I stumble on the incredible tree of the late Dick Webber, barbershop singer, electrical engineer and genealogist. He had privileged information about the three Lewis sisters, born in the 1830s in Merthyr Tydfil: Mary Lewis, Anna Price and Jennet Jenkins. It would be next to impossible to figure out these ladies. All came to the United States and married Welshmen. I am kept very busy tracking the descendants of their sister in Merthyr Tydfil, now called Catherine Abraham. It is apparent her husband emphatically did not want to leave the country.

In March 2017, I hear from Mrs Owen in Knighton who is the first documented descendants of Gwenllian Rees that I have reached (reesed). A moment on which to reflect. It's taken six years.

In 2018 I take a well deserved year out. Ha. Obviously that isn’t true. In October 2017 after a curious day when I drank two unexpected Stellas and learnt that the paternal line was failing, I that evening solved the mystery of 'who was Nathaniel Gee?'; and attempted (thereafter) to crack 'who was his wife Ann?' This research dominated the rest of 2017 and 2018 including dozens of letters to potential mtDNA matches, a visit to the new territory of Staffordshire in February 2018.

In about April 2019 I stumble on a family tree posted by someone in Utah purporting to show Ann Phillips and her husband John Thomas as having one child Margaret, marrying a member of the LDS Church and emigrating to the United States. Other trees were just as keen to suggest this was “Ann Tasker” who had married John Thomas in 1815. But which John Thomas? And how was I supposed to know if my Ann Phillips (baptised 1797 Neath) would actually marry in Merthyr Tydfil? Yes John Thomas appeared to witness the marriage of her sister Gwenllian. But how could I be sure of any of the John/Ann couples from the census? The appearance of this Tasker person on a tree, in the wrong town, shook any confidence I might have in this sketchy bit of data-grubbing. I step away. 

In May 2019 I decide to write to the Lewis sisters and their descendants in Pennsylvania and in Ohio. While doing the necessary research, they went from being very unfamiliar to me to being people that I knew. First I need to resolve ‘Jennet Jenkins’ eventually I find her birth as Janet and marriage to Mr Thomas, and most winningly of all, I find her great-granddaughter still in the area, and happy to talk with me.

In July 2019, I order 97 wills of which about 5 relate to the Merthyr Tydfil line, descendants of Catherine Abraham which leads to more letter-writing to descendants. Bearing in mind the surnames in Merthyr Tydfil, I needed all the help I could get. I manage to find one on Facebook (not sure how) and we chat shortly after this time.

In August 2019, I headed down to Neath on a site visit, and one of the items I stopped at was William Cook’s grave, right outside the church porch of St Catwg, Cadoxton. It is not in fact just his grave at all, but one commemorating a vast number of family members. In fairness I’d had a transcription for some  time from a Cook researcher, but it was something else seeing the actual stone. On it are: Morgan Rees (who dies in 1757), his mother Gwenllian, and Mrs Cook, who is revealed (ta-da!) as Morgan’s half-sister. This explains why she was at pains to focus on the four Rees children in her Will rather than including their Morgan half-siblings. There are absolutely no parish records to confirm any of these stony details.

In November 2019, I write to a descendant of these Lewis sisters, in the female line. He agrees to do a mitochondrial DNA test, which we’ll keep on file until more female line descendants emerge.

In Summer 2020, I finally discover that Gwenllian was often shortened to ‘Luce’ or Lucy. (In Ireland Delia is often short for Bridget.) This helps me bolt on William Williams (1782-1847) onto the tree (mother ‘Luce’), create a plausible outcome for his sister Gwen ‘Lucy’, and rather crucially get some instant descendants for Mary Evans speak-to-my-husband-he’s-the-plumber, via her own Gwenllian ‘Lucy’. And to bring back yet another Gwenllian (Phillips) (1799-1871) from a premature death many years prior (she was herself, then Susan then Lucy in the censuses rather than being three separate wives). If only I could tell you that I happened on the name variation in a learned way. But no: I revisited Anthony Williams (baptised 1808) and considered who his father might be at birth. Was he related? Lo and behold, up pops ‘mother Luce’ against the father’s baptism instead of the expected Gwenllian. A brief lookup confirms this Welsh custom. Hand claps forehead at the lost years of ignorance; and the above four life events incorporating Ls who are really Gs are soldered correctly into position. (I have contact with a cousin in Washington state and together we convince each other that William Williams (1809) is certainly the father of the man in Pennsylvania, and probably yes the son of the man baptised 1782 at Cadoxton. The only fly in the ointment is an eldest child Samuel (1805) which might tip some people towards a William Williams baptised in 1782 at Cilybebyll, the son of Samuel. But all the other names you could possibly hope to wish for, and more, are among the rest of the siblings.

In Summer 2020, I find the marriage bonds and there’s a blog about that. Of marginal interest were my new Turbervilles, notionally in Wales, but of deeper interest was David Thomas, my clockmaker making an appearance again.

Also in summer 2020, I make two more discoveries. Perhaps I am emboldened by having a fellow genealogist under my roof. For some reason I return to the Utah suggestion by online trees that Margaret Thomas, wife of Thomas Davis Giles, the blind harpist and LDS stake president, daughter of John and Ann Thomas; and my own extended thought that was this Ann Phillips, was baptised in 1797 at Neath, the eldest grandchild of Gwenllian Rees. I was actually hunting steadily for Ann’s younger siblings Margaret and Catherine, who have wonderful names and whose fates I was considering. Combing through census returns, even ordering speculative birth certificates for possible children (born in Merthyr Tydfil with mother’s maiden name Phillips). All drew a blank or were inconclusive. I put everyone under the microscope and ended up ordering the death certificate of Thomas Phillip(s) 1849. This was very exciting. Even more so when it came in and informant was Ann Thomas, more evidence that she was the daughter. I remained sceptical about the connection until further digging, prodding and poking yielded up from the FamilySearch tree, a document submitted by a Giles researcher, viz. the second marriage certificate of Ann Thomas (previously Phillips) to Thomas Jarman just prior to their sailing to Utah. Game set and match.

Summer 2020 continued: The next problem was what exactly was the family set up with regard to the granddaughter Ann Hughes that seemingly accompanied them on the trip to Utah. The core family unit was Thomas Davis Giles, sightless player of the harp, who apparently wrote flawless Welsh script, until I realised this was his scribe. Thomas lost his sight thanks to a big rock falling on him, underground. Thomas’s wife Margaret headed west with him. She is buried under Wyoming rock, having died in childbed on the way. Now, a casual glance at the 1851 census for Tredegar shows that Ann Hughes was a “niece”, and one can infer from the places involved that she’s the wife’s “niece”. A rudimentary peering at the Utah Pioneer Database shows that Ann Hughs came with them. And then a closer peek shows that Ann Hughes ‘born 12 March 1840 Merthyr Tudful’ marries and dies in Provo, Utah, with umpteen children and grandchildren. Believe it or not, not a single resident of Utah had clocked that Ann was Margaret’s niece. I mean; really. Having said that it took me a year (from 2019) to be convinced that this whole unit fitted, and another year (from Summer 2020) to get all the certificates and DNA evidence to understand Ann Hughes’s family set-up.

The set-up of the family of Ann Hughes (b. 1841)

Ann Hughes, the niece, was actually born 20 March 1841 at Caedraw, Merthyr Tydfil, being the only person born in this time-frame with the requisite father of David Hughes, and the additional benefit of her mother being Mrs Hughes ‘formerly Thomas’. In 1851 she, or at least the person of this name that emigrates to Utah, is living age ‘11’ with her aunt Margaret Giles nee Thomas at 28 Church Square, Tredegar.

I was really trying to weigh up what had happened to Ann’s parents – the obvious inference was that they had both died. Instead we find David and Mrs Hughes living happy-as-larry in a little row of houses in Aberaman, Aberdare at the time of the census in March 1851. I would like this not to be true but the two daughters (Eliza age 8, and Mary Ann age 2) are found with births registered:

Eliza as Elizabeth Hughes, born 18 Jul 1843 at High Street, Merthyr Tydfil.
Mary Ann Hughes, born 11 Jun 1850 at Onllwyn (not two years of age at all)

So it looks very much as if the eldest child was living permanently with her mother’s sister from perhaps a fairly early age, most likely age 10. As the birth parents had just left Onllwyn, and her aunt had just arrived in Tredegar, and would be living by herself for awhile, I would imagine that Ann Hughes was sent to her aunt at this point (1850/1), effectively becoming their foster child. The aunt was to give birth to nine children, but only one is recorded to have survived infancy: Hyrum Lorenzo Giles. Is it chance that his young cousin was present during his early years? By the time the Giles family chose to permanently emigrate in 1855, there were several small infants.

Crazy as it seems to us, Ann Hughes accompanied her foster parents to Utah, rather than return to her birth parents in Aberdare. At age 15, the emigration focussed on her responsibilities rather than the need for anyone to parent her. Her foster mother (aunt Margaret) died during the migration; and Ann stated that she had ‘lost her mother’. But she hadn’t! Her mother was alive and well in Wales.

So the 1851 census for David and Mrs  Hughes, suspected as being long dead, living in the unexpected locale of Aberdare, was the first twist. Their eldest child had gone to look after an aunt who was struggling, at the age of 10, and had accompanied that aunt in an emigration to Utah four years later with various minor infants. We’re not done yet. [image of 1851]

The next surprise was David Hughes. The 1861 census for himself is equivocal, it’s not at all clear what’s going on. He appears to be lodging in Wind Street Aberdare, a married man, with a daughter, but it’s hard to say. The 1871 census however is crystal clear. He is a widower living with his married youngest child, Mrs Rees, and his status hasn’t changed much by his own death in 1888. That’s absolutely fine at first glance: we can see several possible deaths for his wife in the preceding twenty years. The trouble is they were all eliminated, and she did not die in Wales. She was actually still alive!

Mrs Hughes was interred on the 30 March 1891 at Provo City Cemetery, Utah, and if one is sceptical that this is all too convenient, or inconvenient, her parents are named in the register as ‘John Tomas and Ann Philips’. And, in case you were wondering, her new husband, Andrew Lee Allen, is named too. She was described in papers from his family as being a ‘good and faithful wife’ (to him).

Also buried in Provo City Cemetery are Ann Hughes (daughter) and Ann Phillips (mother). It’s forty years to the day since that census of 1851 that shows Mrs Hughes on a divergent direction to mother and daughter, all three in different households scattered around South Wales. But here they are united in this cemetery.

Ann Hughes, the girl of 15 at emigration, never fully recovered the use of her legs after the exceptionally cold weather of her final walk to Salt Lake, 1856. Why though, does her son John, who ought to have known such things, record Ann’s mother as ‘unknown’ at Ann’s death years later? John would have known and met his grandmother (Mrs Hughes later Allen). Instead he faithfully records David Hughes’s name, a figure he could never surely have met.

Mrs Hughes surely emigrated on her own in the 1850s, as the next wave of emigration from the Welsh valleys began. Her mother and daughter were already in Utah. This family unit is at once the most simple and the most complex I have ever seen.

Her other daughters remained in Wales all their days: Elizabeth marrying at 21 and having a large family who still live in Aberaman; Mary Ann marrying at 18 to a pit engineer and moving with him (and her father David) over the hill and through the forest to Ferndale, which has some of the best public parks in the valleys. Family remembered rumours of an aunt in the United States. And Elizabeth’s descendants form a cluster of DNA matches with Ann’s descendants (in Utah) in a way very much compatible with their being sisters. I was granted access to this information in summer 2021.

Next steps? Well, I would like to find an agreeable descendant of David Thomas, the clockmaker at Llantrisant who was surety at the administration bond of Jennet Morgan’s estate in 1785 and whose daughter was Jennet Giles. Many questions: did he grant an apprenticeship to Jennet’s youngest son, David Morgan? But none of that is for 2021.