My Family History

I’ve been trying to solve a puzzle for about 50 years. I may have finally got at least closer to an answer. I must have still been a boy when my Dad first explained to me that our surname was ‘Powell-Davies’ because his father had been adopted and raised as ‘Tom Davies’ by the Davies family. However, he had then added ‘Powell’ to his surname when he found out that the name of his actual birth mother was ‘Mary Powell’. And ‘Powell’ turns out to be the surname he was first listed under in the 1891 census record for Pontypridd: The 1891 census showing my grandfather as an 'adopted son' But who was Mary? – and who was my grandfather’s actual father? Nobody really knew. When I first started trying to find out, there was no such thing as an internet search! Instead, I went to the records office to track down a copy of my grandfather’s birth certificate – but that threw up as many questions as answers: My grandfather's birth certificate It confirmed that his mother was, indeed, ‘...

For the last morning of our trip - a blustery morning with torrential showers falling as 'Storm Debi' blew across Wales - we travelled up the Rhondda valley to Pontypridd, a town that ties together the various threads of my paternal family tree. The famous old bridge in Pontypridd William Rees from Llansaint and Margaret Williams from Llansawel A marriage certificate that I have just tracked down shows that William and Margaret (already a widow) were married in Merthyr Tydfil in 1843. Whether they had first met in Carmarthenshire, or after they had migrated over to the Valleys, isn't clear. By 1851, William the 'Cabinet Maker' and his family had moved down the Rhondda valley to live in Pontypridd, and this is where my great-grandmother Sarah Jane Rees was born in 1852.   The town was still fairly small in the 1850s but was starting to grow rapidly . In the town museum, at the end of the old bridge, we found a model of the area of the town where William, Margaret...