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...

This is the third of four posts setting out what I have pieced together about my paternal ancestry, working back from my grandparents, Thomas and Isabella. My second post  traced back the family tree  from my great grandmother, Sarah Jane Rees,  back through the Rees family to the parishes of Llanelly and Llangyndeyrn.  In this post, I will follow the ancestry trail back through Sarah Jane's mother, Margaret, to another part of Carmarthenshire - the village of Llansawel. From there, I will also show how the family tree links with Welsh emigrants who headed to Pennsylvania and Utah - and became pioneer Mormons. Margaret Williams - my 2nd great grandmother BIRTH 1818 • Llansawel, Carmarthenshire, Wales DEATH AFT. 1861 • Pontypridd, Glamorgan, Wales CERTAINTY: HIGH - matches with census and other records Margaret Rees's birthplace is recorded in the 1861 census as Llansawel, a village about 20 miles north-east of Carmarthen. However, without any record of my second...