Finally finding Mary Powell - the missing half of my surname
I've been searching for the missing roots of my surname for most of my life. This evening, I think I've finally answered one of the questions that I have been trying to resolve ever since I was a teenager.
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| Mary Powell - married in the Swansea Valley and daughter of a blacksmith |
As I've explained in previous posts, my Dad had always known that our surname 'Powell-Davies' was what his father Thomas - my grandfather - had eventually decided to call himself. By the time he was twenty or so, he had chosen to be known by this 'double-barrelled' surname to reflect his twin roots - as being both a 'Powell' and a 'Davies' - and we have used that name ever since.
Why Davies?
The "Davies" part of the surname is easy to understand. It was the name that my grandfather was known by in his youth. That's because he was brought up in Pontypridd as one of the children of Barbara and Thomas Davies. But Thomas Davies - a local non-conformist preacher as well as being a foreman at the Brown Lenox chainworks - wasn't his biological father. His "real" father's identity was unknown (although, thanks to DNA, I think I've worked out who he was, Timothy Burke, a miner, originally from County Cork ...). Instead, as the census records for 1881 and 1891 confirm, my grandfather had been adopted by Thomas and Barbara Davies when he was just a baby.
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| Above - the census for 1881, below for 1891 and 1901: |
Why Powell?
But those census records also confirm what Thomas had learned, presumably from his adopted parents, as he grew older - that his original name wasn't 'Davies' at all, but 'Powell'. That's why he chose to change his name to "Powell-Davies".
He had been told that that his birth mother's name was Mary Powell. He also knew or, at least, that was certainly the family lore passed down through his four sons, that Mary - my great grandmother - had been a servant on the St. Donat's estate on the Glamorganshire coast, near Llantwit Major. However, when she gave birth to Thomas in 1880, as an "unmarried mother" Mary had had to give her baby boy away (although how Thomas ended up with the Davies family in Pontypridd is an unsolved mystery).
One of the first things that I managed to track down in my search for Mary, one that began when I was still a teenager, was my grandfather's birth certificate. It confirmed that the family lore about Mary and Llantwit Major had been right:
It was many years before I returned to the quest for Mary Powell. By then, online searches and DNA matches had replaced card catalogues and microfilms! This opened up possibilities that hadn't been there before. I quickly tracked down an 1881 census record for St. Donat's Castle which usefully listed a "Mary Powell" on its list of servants. She is down as a "laundrymaid", rather than the "dairymaid" on the 1880 birth certificate above, but it seemed a good match. So, when my grandfather was born, it does seem that his mother Mary was indeed "in service" at St. Donat's.
But where was his mother, Mary Powell "formerly Davies", originally from?
That 1881 census record lists Mary as an unmarried 26 year-old servant, born in Glyn-neath, a town at the top of the Vale of Neath. But (which I overlooked to start with), to trace Mary's childhood roots, I needed to look for a "Mary Davies". That's because she was listed as "formerly Davies" on the birth certificate, presumably having married a husband (but was then perhaps widowed?) with the surname "Powell".
Frustratingly, there are too many birth records for 'Mary Davies' around 1854 in Glyn-neath - and/or its Cadoxton-juxta-Neath parish - to be sure if any of them are my great grandmother. Neither have I been able to pinpoint a specific marriage record between a Mary Davies and a "Powell" that I can be sure belongs to her either.
However, a series of DNA matches revealing some unknown distant cousins, particularly in Pennsylvania, plus an 1861 census record for Glyn-neath, led me to conclude that Mary had probably been born as "Mary Ann Davies", the daughter of a blacksmith, David Davies and another unmarried mother, Jane Davies, who emigrated to Australia a few years later. I've explained this further in the post I made in 2024.
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| David Davies, Blacksmith, in the 1861 census. His son William, who emigrated to Pennsylvania, provides a common link to several DNA matches with distant US cousins. |
But now, a year later, I've now found some more evidence to back that up! Another set of unexplained DNA matches pointed me in the direction of a marriage certificate for a couple from Ystalyfera, in the Swansea Valley, in 1883, also pasted at the top of this blogpost.
The two newly confirmed DNA matches - both of a strength suggesting that my 'new' relatives could be my second cousins - only make sense if, as our common family trees suggest, the Mary Powell on this certificate is indeed our common ancestor.
So, this must indeed be "my" Mary Powell! The bride is of (nearly!) the right age (but ages always seem to be a bit hit-and-miss in these records) and she's a widow - as I would have expected if her original maiden name was Davies. Mary is also listed as the daughter of David Davies, still working as a blacksmith, just as the family ties from my previous DNA matches had suggested. So, I am confident that I've finally tracked down my great grandmother with a reasonable degree of certainty!
So what became of Mary Powell after she gave birth to my grandfather in 1880?
Up until now, I had not managed to confirm any trace of Mary Powell after the 1881 census. What had become of her? I'm hoping that this marriage certificate suggests that the tough life that she had had up until then may at least have got a little happier - for a few years at least.
Her husband, Thomas Morgan, was also a widower. The death certificate of his first wife, Margaret, shows she had died of typhoid in 1882. Thomas was a "tin doubler" but the marriage certificate shows that he was also the son of a blacksmith - perhaps it's through the blacksmith connections of their fathers that Mary Powell and Thomas Morgan were introduced? Who knows!
The 1891 census for Ystalyfera (in the parish of Llangiwg), shows that, with Thomas working at the tinworks, Mary looked after three of Thomas' children from his first marriage as well as three new arrivals of her own. The whole family is listed as being Welsh speakers with my great grandmother's birthplace now recorded as being in Cwmgwrach - which lies just down the Neath valley from Glyn-neath itself.
I even now have a photograph of the eldest of Mary's own daughters, Margaret, born on 11 April 1885:
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| Margaret Dauncey nee Morgan |
The last piece of the puzzle left by my Uncle Mervyn (just about) falls into place
Margaret, the daughter photographed above, also helps a last piece of the puzzle fall into place - one that I haven't been able to fit ever since I quizzed my Uncle Mervyn about what he knew of family history about 45 years ago!
Mervyn, who lived from 1904 to 1982, was the oldest of my grandfather's sons. When I first started wondering about the origins of our "Powell-Davies" surname, I thought Mervyn - who was actually known to his friends as "Powell" - was most likely to be able to shed light on the missing parts of our family tree. I still have the scribbled notes that I took of a conversation that I had with him about it:
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| My teenage notes from a conversation with Uncle Mervyn |
Intriguingly, Mervyn insisted that there had been contact between Mary Powell and her adopted son and that she had come to visit Thomas and the Davies' in Pontypridd. However, my own father insisted that he was wrong. Mervyn also told me that Mary had married a miner with the surname "Dauncey", somewhere in the Swansea valley. However, I had never been able to trace such a marriage in the records.
Today's newly found information helps explain that Mervyn's memories had confused things - but only a little. Yes, it turns out that Mary Powell had gone on to marry a man from the Swansea valley - but a tin worker, Thomas Morgan. However, that memory of a "Dauncey" husband wasn't so far from the mark - but it was Mary's daughter, Margaret, who had married a miner called John Dauncey there in 1902:
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| The surname is spelt "Dancey" on this certificate but "Dauncey" in some later records |
Jenny, one of the great grandchildren of John and Margaret, is in fact one of the new "DNA matches" that has helped bring these puzzle pieces together. And, even if Mervyn's memories were slightly scrambled, the fact that he knew anything at all about the "Dauncey" surname certainly suggests that there WAS ongoing contact between Mary Powell - and perhaps her daughter Margaret too - and the Davies family in Pontypridd. Otherwise, how could Mervyn had possibly known of that surname? If so, then I'm glad to know that Mary was able to find out how her son was faring - and will have known he was faring very well in his Pontypridd home.
A sad ending
My happiness at knowing that Mary Powell did not vanish without trace after all, is tinged with sadness at also knowing that she didn't live beyond her early forties. That's because her death certificate shows that she died in February 1897, at the age of 42. Mary's death is recorded as taking place at the family home in Owen's Row, Ystalyfera, officially reported by her stepson, George Morgan. Tragically, it looks from the certificate that she may have died in childbirth.
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| Holy Trinity churchyard - from www.ystalyfera-history.co.uk |
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