My Family History

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 ... UPDATE 22.08.25 - and it appears ALL of these possible leads are dead-ends - so the puzzle remains unsolved ...  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 t...

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...

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...