A visit into the past: Day 1 - Llansawel

Online ancestry searching can uncover a lot about your family's past but an in-person visit to the places where they lived can sometimes uncover more. That’s why we're spending a few days in various corners of South Wales, starting today with the small Carmarthenshire village of Llansawel.

Llansawel is where my third great grandparents, Charles and Sarah Williams, lived from their marriage in the village in 1814 until their deaths at the ages of 80 and 73 respectively. But how many traces did they and their children leave to still be found today? As it turns out, more than we could have hoped for!

The George, the Red Lion and the Post Office

Llansawel's tiny main street was once full of pubs, and Charles and Sarah ran two of them, first the George Inn and then the Red Lion. As we had expected, we found that the Black Lion and the Angel Inn are still working pubs.

We also met a woman who told us that she lives in what was once the Swan Inn, on the other side of the bridge over the river.

But what had happened to the other pubs listed in the history of the village? The 1841 tithe map shows Charles Williams as the occupier of the George Inn, set back from the main street. 

And that's exactly where we found the crumbling remains of its buildings, by an old courtyard reached through a passageway under a house on the main street now named 'George Terrace'.

One of the neighbouring houses on the street must have once been the Red Lion and, on its other side, a building that was run by one of Charles and Sarah's sons, David, as a draper's shop and Post Office. (But see my 'Day 2' update too!)

Although the shopfront has been replaced by smaller windows, the building that was once the Post Office shop was still easy enough to make out.

St. Sawyl's Churchyard

The parish church stands in a small churchyard, behind the Black Lion and the other buildings on the opposite side of the main street to the George and Red Lion. We knew from the parish registers that Charles and Sarah Williams had been buried there but there are no online records of their gravestones.

It turned out that the older part of the churchyard around the church was now just turf but with many of the old gravestones repositioned around its perimeter. Some are buried in the undergrowth but some inscriptions were still clear and legible, either in English or in Welsh.

And then we found it - Charles and Sarah's gravestone, also carrying the names of two of their daughters, Amelia and Eleanor:

There were several other memorials that I photographed to see if they can be linked to other ancestry records but, on a low wall just besides the entrance gate to the churchyard, was another kind of inscription that also bore the surname 'Williams':

Martha was the second wife of David Williams, the draper and postmaster. Why she felt it important to state her claim to the wall with this inscription is unclear! But Martha was indeed from the 'Post Office, Llansawel', running it after her husband's death in 1882 for over 20 years more, until she also died in 1904. Indeed, it was the card sent to my great grandmother in Pontypridd, informing her of Martha's death, found amongst my Dad's old memorabilia, that first pointed me to my family's link with Llansawel. 

Bethel Cemetery 

Like most Welsh villages, as well as the parish church, other chapels stand in Llansawel built by those supporting different nonconformist creeds. A newspaper article from the 'Baner ac Amserau Cymru' of August 16 1882 suggested that the draper David Williams had been buried in the cemetery of the Bethel Chapel rather than in the graveyard of the Parish Church. 

Walking into the cemetery it was clear that several of the memorials were now lying face down, making it impossible to read them. However, once again, we struck lucky by finding an area of the cemetery containing two Williams gravestones.

One gravestone marks not only David's burial in 1882 but also Martha's in 1904.

The other gravestone presents a sad record of the short lives of some of the couple's children. Whilst one of them lived long enough to have been noted in the 1881 census, the other infants did not live long enough to do so.

Overall, while we had come to Llansawel expecting to go away with perhaps little more than a feel for the village where my ancestors had once lived, these visible records still to be found in the village were a very welcome surprise! Let's see what tomorrow brings!