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Tracing the Snelgroves back into Hampshire and Wiltshire

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Having concentrated for so long on investigating the ‘unknown’ branch of my paternal family tree, I realised that I had neglected thoroughly recording the history of the branch of the family tree that I have always known best – that of my maternal grandfather, John Snelgrove. William Snelgrove  It was back at the end of 2022 that I last posted on the history of how the Snelgroves had made the change “from New Forest gardeners to London florists”. In that post, I traced the ‘Snelgrove’ branch of my family history forwards in time from the 1851 census to the 1920s. In this post, I will explain how far I think I can trace that history back into the past. Jane Brown Tracing back from 1851 My starting point in the previous post was the 1851 census for the Eaglehurst estate in Fawley, on the edges of the New Forest. The census confirms that one of the workers on that estate, one of its gardeners, was my great-great-grandfather William Snelgrove. Alongside William (aged 31), that 185...
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So who really put the Powell into the Powell-Davies?

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If you happen to have come upon this post, then please be warned that this is really a set of notes for my own benefit - otherwise (as I have done before now!) I'll forget what I've worked out and will have to start from scratch all over again ... After working out fairly conclusively the origins - and certainly the later life - of Mary Powell, my great-grandmother, there's a puzzle still to solve. Who did 'Mary Davies' of Glyn Neath marry in the 1870s to become 'Mary Powell' by the time my grandfather was born in 1880? And, if so, what became of her former 'Powell' husband for her to be a 'widow' when she then married Thomas Morgan in 1883? Searching for a Mary Davies + "Mr. Powell "marriage There is, of course, the possibility that no such marriage took place or, if it did, it wasn't formally recorded. However, if the marriage is somewhere on the  'Find My Past'  online database, then these are the six possibilities th...
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Finally finding Mary Powell - the missing half of my surname

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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. 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 pr...
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