Connecting in South Wales

My Hunters and Harrises were from Cornwall.

The Ponsfords and Hanneys were from Somerset.

The Cadogans and Francises were from West Wales.

They all connected in the tinplate works and associated industries around the north of Swansea in the mid-1800s.

My grandfather being from Morriston, Swansea, I knew about many of the family connections. But it is only a bit more recently - thanks to some puzzling DNA matches, and dare-I-say to online trees, that the full picture is emerging. Well some more of it at least.

We knew that the Hanney Silver Band popped up twice - once as my grandpa's maternal half-uncles and secondly as marrying his father's cousin Mary Ann Harris.

I was pretty sure that the Cadogans appeared two times, or three depending how you count, as my grandpa's uncle Tom married a Cadogan and then Tom's cousin Francis married Jessie Ponsford Cadogan as his first wife. The two Cadogans being cousins.

I hadn't appreciated that Francis's nephew David, who married a daughter of Sid Turner, had also married into the Ponsfords. As Sid was a maternal cousin of Jessie and her sister Annie. This helped explain why Sid's daughter was able to put me in touch with Jessie and Annie's grandson back in 1993.

Then we come to the DNA. Why on earth were my Hanney half-blood relatives showing up as DNA matches to the descendants of Elizabeth Rodda Harris, who married in 1869 to Samuel Hynam? It turned out that Samuel's aunt Hannah had married in Marksbury to James Hanney senior, progenitor of the clan in Swansea. (It further emerged that one of the couple's grandsons had married Annie Ponsford Cadogan.)

It emerges that the Hanney cousin was connected to Samuel Hynam possibly up to five separate ways.

Examining the wider Hynam tree just now, I discovered two things:

1) that when I rang Miss Hynam in the Swansea phone book in 1992 I had very good odds of reaching the right branch of the family, as the family though large had sons who mostly left the family area

2) that there are some good candidates including a Lily Hynam living in Coventry who might have invited my mother for an ill-fated visit in the late 1950s

I am almost certain that there most be other hidden connections. I remembered almost having to apologise to folk in Swansea for being connected to the Hanneys twice in such a muddling way, but now I see it is par for the course...