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"Victory in Europe" - at what cost to those who fought?

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My mother's Uncle Arthur (aka 'Dick') after the war " Arthur is back from internment but we cannot convey to each other what the past years were like " (1946). The people who want to celebrate "victories" in wars are rarely those who fought in them - because those who do the actual fighting are left with the memories that they'd rather forget about what war is really like.  That was certainly true of my family, not least my Uncle Bert who fought through North Africa and Italy, and my Uncle Noel who did the same before also being parachuted into Greece in 1944. They both knew only too well what it's like to take part in modern warfare - and that's also why both said very little about what they had been through. My own Mum - who worked on the radar stations on the south coast looking out for the rockets that could be landing on her family back in London - also rarely discussed a war which had brought her too much grief and stress. It was only a...
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Following back the family tree to a miner from the 1780s

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William, son of David Jones, Miner, by his wife, Rachel, Cilycwm, 1786. In my previous post , I explained how a combination of ancestry records and DNA matches had helped me to finally 'fill in the blanks' that had long existed on the family tree for my adopted grandfather, Thomas. Thomas' mother's name had been given on his 1880 birth certificate as "Mary Powell formerly Davies, a dairymaid". This dairymaid, Mary, is therefore my great grandmother: My grandfather's birth certificate Jane and David, my second great grandparents Now, as explained in that previous post, if I have put the puzzle pieces together correctly, I am fairly certain that Mary's father must have been David Davies (2GG) , a blacksmith originally from Llanddeusant in the Black Mountain area of what is now the Brecon Beacons National Park. I also believe that he r mother was Jane Davies   from Llywel, a village about ten miles from Llanddeusant. However it appears that Jane - who lat...
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Filling in the blanks on my family tree

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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, ‘...
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