My Family History

For the last morning of our trip - a blustery morning with torrential showers falling as 'Storm Debi' blew across Wales - we travelled up the Rhondda valley to Pontypridd, a town that ties together the various threads of my paternal family tree. The famous old bridge in Pontypridd William Rees from Llansaint and Margaret Williams from Llansawel A marriage certificate that I have just tracked down shows that William and Margaret (already a widow) were married in Merthyr Tydfil in 1843. Whether they had first met in Carmarthenshire, or after they had migrated over to the Valleys, isn't clear. By 1851, William the 'Cabinet Maker' and his family had moved down the Rhondda valley to live in Pontypridd, and this is where my great-grandmother Sarah Jane Rees was born in 1852.   The town was still fairly small in the 1850s but was starting to grow rapidly . In the town museum, at the end of the old bridge, we found a model of the area of the town where William, Margaret...

Until I took an Ancestry DNA test, there was little in my family tree that linked me to Ireland. This post is based on the potential DNA matches that I have made, which hint that the 'missing father' on my grandfather's birth certificate could have been an Irish migrant to South Wales in the 1840s.  The parishes referred to in the 1851 census record for the Burke family (see below) My adopted grandfather's unknown heritage As I have explained in two other posts on this blog, my Welsh grandfather, Thomas, was adopted by the Davies family and brought up in Pontypridd. His birth certificate shows he was born elsewhere in Glamorgan - in Llantwit Major in April 1880. His mother's name is given as  Mary Powell, a dairymaid,  but the space for the name of the father has been left blank - and it has always remained unknown. Family lore has always suggested that the father was  one of the sons of the Nicholl Carnes, landowners of  the nearby St. Donats estate. The...