My Family History

From Caio to Utah Sarah Williams, my third great grandmother whose gravestone we found in Llansawel, had a younger sister, Mary. In 1820, Mary married Joseph Lewis, from the nearby village of Caio. We passed through this village on the first afternoon of this trip and visited the churchyard where Joseph was buried (but we didn't find any gravestone). However, some of their children - whose descendants match DNA with mine - weren’t buried anywhere in Wales. Instead, they emigrated to the United States, two of them in Utah as Mormon Pioneers. The "History of Llansawel" describes how Mormon missionaries had visited the area and had "created quite a stir by their preaching and teaching". The burial records for both Mary and Joseph give their last abode as "Tyn y Lan, Llanwrda", which also matches the 1851 census record where Joseph is listed there as  a "farmer of 38 acres". Having found that smallholding marked on an old map of the area, we drov...

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 o...

I had said that my previous post on this blog was going to be my last foray into the ancestry archives for this summer. However, my research has put me in touch with someone who has also been very helpfully researching a branch of what turns out to be part of the same family tree. So there's more than enough resources available for one more 'bonus' post! My third post from this summer's research explained how I had managed to trace my family tree back to my third great grandparents, Charles and Sarah Williams, innkeepers - amongst other trades - in the Carmarthenshire village of Llansawel. In this post, I want to head back down the family tree from Charles and Sarah. However, instead of taking the branch that leads to my own grandparents, I will instead head in the direction of my newly found US potential cousin - Kathryn! Charles and Sarah at the George Inn, Llansawel An 1838 Tithe Map of the village confirms that Charles Williams is occupying the George Inn, and its ...