My Family History

DNA, documents, and lucky breaks The TV schedules are full of detectives using forensic science to track down criminal masterminds. Tracking down family ancestry sometimes needs a similar approach - making the most of DNA matches, spotting the clues in documentary evidence - and sometimes getting some lucky breaks too!  However, while CSI usually catch their criminals in the end, ancestry tracing can often end up in frustrating failure as the trail back into history runs cold amongst increasingly uncertain evidence.  Nevertheless, I've managed to piece together a few more clues for my own Welsh - and now, fairly certainly, also Irish - paternal ancestry. In this - and in further following posts - I am sharing what my investigations have concluded on various branches of my family tree, working back through history from  my grandparents, Thomas and I sabella  Powell-Davies. As I have set out in another post , they were both born in the spring of 1880 and were married i...

Today, 5th July 2023, health campaigners will be marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS, as I will be myself on a campaign stall in my town centre in Kendal. It therefore seemed an appropriate day to add a post about my father, Thomas Dillwyn Powell-Davies, to this family history blog. That’s because the ‘birthplace’ of the NHS was the Welsh town of Tredegar, and that’s also the town where my father worked from 1936-1946, work whose value was acknowledged by none other than Aneurin Bevan himself. A testimonial for my father from Nye Bevan My father’s treasured photograph album of his time in Tredegar, together with his files about his work with wartime evacuees, and his letters demanding that action be taken about housing and poverty in the town, also provide a record that may be useful to anyone with an interest in the history of Tredegar.    I have included some of them in this post, including personal correspondence with Nye Bevan. I should only add at the outset that, as ...

The Dekemvriana - Τα Δεκεμβριανά - Athens,  December 1944  The heavy fighting that took place on the streets of Athens in December 1944 doesn't feature highly in the official histories of the Second World War.  Perhaps that's because a battle between the Greek resistance forces of ELAS and British Army troops, who had been welcomed into Athens as "allies" just a few months previously, does not fit easily into a simple narrative of "Victory in Europe".  17.12.44: Paratroopers advance on Evripidou Street  © IWM NA 20908    The defeat for ELAS, and the Greek Civil War that followed, also exposes how Stalin, and the cynical policies of the Communist Party leadership, extinguished the hopes of so many who had fought to fight fascism  in Greece, just as they had done in Spain during its Civil War at the end of the 1930s. The Photographer - Lt. Noel Powell-Davies What might surprise anyone reading this post, one that I openly acknowledge is written ...