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...

For our second day of our 'ancestry tour' we headed south-west from Llansawel to the county town of Carmarthen / Caerfyrddin to investigate some other branches of the family tree. However, some finds in the box file on Llansawel in the town's reference library meant that we could also add some updates to yesterday's discoveries. A better "then and now" picture than yesterday's! Llansawel update The box file in the library contained a record compiled in 1973 of all of the monumental inscriptions in the St. Sawyl's churchyard - before they were mostly removed to its perimeter. The record noted that the 'sandstone headstone' of Charles and Sarah Williams had been labelled as No. 22 - and so it's original position in the churchyard could be ascertained from the accompanying plan. There were also some other records of 'Morgan' and 'Williams' gravestones that might be of interest, so we returned to the churchyard in the gathering ...