Welsh Genealogy E-Book

Dr Bruce Durie

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 512

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Welsh genealogy is usually included with its English cousin, but there are significant differences between the two, and anyone wishing to trace their Welsh ancestry will encounter peculiarities that are not covered by books on English family history. There is a separate system of archives and repositories for Wales, there are differences in civil registration and censuses, Nonconformist registers are dissimilar to those of other Churches and Welsh surnames and place names are very different to English ones. Welsh Genealogy covers all of this as well as the basic Welsh needed by family historians; estate, maritime, inheritance, education and parish records; peculiarities of law; the Courts of Great Sessions and particular patterns of migration. Written by Dr Bruce Durie, the highly respected genealogist, lecturer and author of the acclaimed Scottish Genealogy, this is the ideal book for local and family historians setting out on a journey to discover their Welsh ancestry.

Leseprobe

History is the dumping-ground of biology.

And genealogy is one way of keeping the score.

Bruce Durie, with thanks to Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The man who has only the excellence of his ancestry to boast of, resembles that edible root, the potato, the best part being under ground.

Sir Thomas Overbury

A genealogist is someone who regards a step backwards as progress.

Unknown

Contents

Title

Quote

Preface

  1.  An Introduction to Genealogical Research

  2.  The Welsh – A Genealogist’s Perspective

  3.  Welsh Surnames

  4.  Administrative Areas and Local Records

  5.  The Welsh Censuses of 1841 to 1911

  6.  Statutory Registers of Birth, Marriage and Death Post-1855

  7.  Parish Registers Pre-1837

  8.  Nonconformist and Other Church Records

  9.  Welsh Emigration and Immigration

10.  Taxation and Representation

11.  Welsh Heraldry

12.  Dates, Money and Measure

13.  Occupations and Professions

14.  Military Records

15.  Welsh Language for Genealogy

16.  Organising Your Research

17.  Degrees of Kinship

Envoi

Copyright

Preface

This book emerged from courses in genealogy, family history, heraldry, palaeography and related subjects at the universities of Strathclyde and Edinburgh, and from talks and lectures given elsewhere. It is not a list of sources, although a great many sources are mentioned. There are other places to get lists of books, archive holdings and websites. It is, rather, intended as a working manual for genealogists with an interest in Welsh records and family history, firmly based in the praxis of a genealogical researcher and educator, with worked examples, templates and methodologies. It is aimed at all those interested in pursuing proper research into Welsh records and archives for genealogical purposes. This includes:

– Anyone wishing to trace ancestors of a particular person of Welsh descent, including those in countries that accepted the Welsh diaspora – principally the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, southern Africa and India;

– Archivists, librarians, registers and those who guide others in the use of records and archives;

– Those with a professional interest in Welsh genealogy – lawyers, records agents, researchers in archives and, of course, genealogists;

– Anyone needing a suitable textbook for a preparatory course on Welsh genealogy.

There are subjects here not routinely covered in most introductory genealogy books – for instance, the interpretation of mediaeval documents, Latin inscriptions and palaeography. Where possible and relevant, parallels and differences have been drawn between Welsh genealogy and that of Scotland, England, Ireland and other countries. As the basic family history sources – censuses, vital records and the various registers of property, electors and membership – become more readily available, genealogists will seek to push their research further back in time to the 1500s and earlier. There is much in this book that, with luck, will be of wider interest than the records of Wales, but as these are so rich and go back so far, there is a great deal every genealogist can learn from their study and careful application.

Finally, thanks are due to staff at The National Archives, Kew (TNA), the National Library of Wales, many local libraries, archives and societies, and to the numerous long-suffering university colleagues and family members who put up with the process of authorship.

To quote an old Welsh saying, particularly appropriate to the study of those long gone: Yn araf deg mae dal iâr (The way to catch a hen is slowly).

1

An Introduction to Genealogical Research

If you are new to family history, please read this chapter. If you are an experienced family history researcher, please read this chapter. Whether you agree or disagree with the techniques and tips in here, it may make you think about your existing practices. This is not a ‘how to do it’ menu so much as recipes born of years of experience in researching, teaching and writing about genealogy and local history. Nor is it the only way to approach research, but it is intended to help readers avoid some of the common pitfalls, and get the best out of their time and energies. Individual chapters may suggest a research strategy or source not previously considered, or a new approach to a long-standing problem.

Why are we doing this?

History is the great destroyer – it destroys reputations, illusions, myths and vanities; it reminds us that we are all mortal and passing; it teaches us that we have little control over our actions and their consequences, our destinies and even our motives. We have no hand in choosing our ancestors, and little over our descendants’ choice of friends and spouses. Each of us is the product of our genes, our immediate family environment, our society and the influence of the wider world. Even our deepest-held beliefs, prejudices and bigotries dissolve when put under the microscope of history, and our seemingly complex human world is much like an ant colony when viewed from a sufficient distance. But where genealogy differs from history per se is that it moves the focus away from the grand sweep of civilisations and larger social groups to the lives and actions of individuals and immediate families. It is often as far from the ‘Great Man’ view of history the way it used to be taught (lists of kings and battles) as a cat is from a queen. Those interested in history itself often find it is best illuminated when seen through the life of one person, an ancestor with whom we have some commonality of feeling by virtue of no more than a shared surname or location, or a half-remembered family story.

However, the majority of such people led quiet, blameless lives and left very few traces, and almost all sources of biography come from collision with the authorities. This tends to be for purposes of registration (birth, marriage, death, census, taxes, poor relief etc.) or for legal reasons, whether criminal (arrests, trials, executions, witness statements) or civil (law suits, divorce, wills, property transfers). All of these generated records, which may still exist in some form, or at least as indexes or abstracts.

Being a small country, the set of records available in Wales is approximately one-twentieth of that of England, and is therefore of manageable proportions. Welsh genealogy is, to that extent, easier. However, there is far more to Welsh genealogy than merely searching for vital data in the old parish registers (OPRs – baptism, marriage and burial records from the 1500s to 1836), statutory records (births, marriages and deaths from 1837) and the decennial censuses from 1841).

The parish registers, by definition, only start with the birth of the Reformation in the 1500s, and only deal with the Established Church. Catholics, Episcopalians, the many Nonconformists in Wales and those who simply chose not to take part in parish registration (the nobility, often) are completely ignored until much later. Those registers that exist may not be easy to access. Equally, records of burials were not considered important until well after the Reformation, since it was only after that time that bodily resurrection at the last trump became an issue – before this, the location of physical remains hardly mattered except for royalty or anyone likely to achieve sainthood (and therefore be a source of relics and an object of veneration). Even then, the parish registers are incomplete.

So, before the 1500s, family history can become murky. However, names were often recorded in charters, especially when feudally held lands were passed on, or where grants of land, titles or other inheritances held of the sovereign had to be recorded. There were also records of pedigree and coats of arms in heraldic records, which are a rich source of name and place information.

Most genealogical research stalls somewhere in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Between the 1500s and the 1830s to 1840s (the beginning of statutory registration, the censuses and much else, as the Victorians set about organising a secular society) not everyone will be recorded, especially Nonconformists and the poor, particularly in both the sparsely populated areas and the densely packed centres of very large towns and cities. Remember that it was mainly baptisms (not births) which were noted in the parish registers, and the same goes for the other sacraments – proclamation of marriage (banns) rather than the marriage itself, and burial or mort-cloth (shroud) rental rather than death.

Even after the 1840s, the records are incomplete. Not everyone was captured; there were considerable movements into, out of and within Wales; surname and place name variants and Welsh spellings were commonly recorded haphazardly – so they give a partial picture of an individual’s life. At best, the researcher can get a person’s given name at birth plus a date and place, and the names, address and (possibly) occupations of the parents and their date of marriage; the announcement of banns (pre-1837) or registration of a marriage may include the place, and the names and occupations of both spouses, and those of both sets of parents, plus names of witnesses; and at death, the place and time of death are given, and often the cause, with the names and occupations of the deceased’s parents and of the registrant (witness). Such scraps can be filled in with census information from every decade between 1841 and 1911. For example, someone who was born in 1850, married in 1870 and died in 1920, will usually be able to be identified, along with their parents, spouse and spouse’s parents, from BMD records; and all of these people can be further identified in the snapshots from the censuses of 1841 to 1901. This may take us back to the birth of that person’s parents in the early 1800s and of their parents (if alive in 1841), that is, to 1780 or so.

But such scraps of information leave much to be told. Were they rich or poor? Owned land or rented it? Had children or otherwise? The accessible vital records give a very bare-bones account. Precisely because much of these data are digitised and available online, it is possible to imagine, as is often claimed, that ‘all of genealogy is on the Internet’.

This is where most people stop looking. In truth, it may be enough for them to start building a family tree with a reassuringly complete and impressively precise set of dates and places. But there are many pitfalls: a child born a year or more after a dead sibling might be given the same name; there may be inconsistencies in ages across the various censuses, leading to inaccurate linkages of completely separate individuals; children of ‘irregular’ marriages may not be recorded; anyone could be away from home on census night; there is emigration and re-immigration; and we find seemingly identical individuals, stemming from the understandable but infuriating practice of naming children after parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, leading to complete families with children of the same names, married to other people of the same names, probably their near relatives, and living in the same parish.

Fortunately, that’s not all there is to it. There are other sources of information, which fill out the details of individual lives, and allow the grouping of individuals by family group, locality or occupation. These include: charters; wills; dissenting and Catholic church records; lair records (for churches or municipal cemeteries); local electoral and valuation rolls; court records; military lists; Poor Law records; registers of professions, trades and guilds; and many others. Then there are landed individuals. They may be of the nobility (whether of the English, Scottish, Irish or British peerages), manorial or baronetage (which is a kind of hereditary knighthood), or be merely landowning persons. Often, these people will have had coats of arms, so heraldry is a useful adjunct to ‘standard’ genealogy.

Finally, there is DNA evidence, which may indicate surname links and deeper ethnic ancestry, but can also help in cases where documentary evidence is lacking. It can, furthermore, hold surprises – welcome or otherwise.

This book is intended to show researchers how to get beyond the standard BMD and census search, and dig deeper into genealogy and the social history surrounding an individual or family. Necessarily, there will be some discussion on other archives outside Wales: TNA in England; Scottish and Irish records; US and Canadian census data, ships’ passenger lists and so on.

Is genealogy the same as family history?

Not really, but they have a lot in common, and each informs the other. Genealogy (as the term is used in this book) is the study and construction of familial relationships, mainly from vital records – birth, marriage, death, censuses etc. Family history concerns itself more with events and their social context. To that extent, genealogy is the Who and Where, while family history is the What and When. Sociology would doubtless claim to be concerned with the Why, although much sociological investigation centres on the collection of the sort of data used by family historians and genealogists, and then tends to turn it into statistical summaries. Perhaps it is better to think by analogy to the sciences – genealogy is more like mathematics while family history is chemistry, and sociology is nature study or population biology. Or, genealogy is the bones, and family history is the flesh on the bones, and each needs the other.

Frankly, such hair-splitting is rather fruitless. We all know a straightforward piece of genealogy when we see it (a pedigree, for instance) and a family history (such as a biography). It is rather pointless, or at least unilluminating, to collect only the dates of birth, marriage and death, and the locations of these, for a family tree or pedigree, without understanding something of why great-grandfather gave up the pastoral life to work in a coal mine, grandfather was a grocer in a different county, and father left for Australia but came back. Equally, it is difficult to understand a complex family history without a simple table of relationships and dates. A good example of this is the intermarriages of European royalty in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many of whom were related by descent from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. But just having the rather useful charts at the back of such books tells us little about the politics or the social conditions of the time.

It is generally agreed that family history is more about who people were and how they lived, why they did this job or married that spouse in that place, the circumstances in which they were born, worked, loved, fought, died, and the wider social and economic milieu of the time. Like all narratives, family history is open to speculation and interpretation. Genealogy is, in a sense, more precise, as it deals largely with concrete parameters – dates and places, for example. Genealogy is about tracing (and proving) ancestry and descent, sometimes called ‘pedigree’ or ‘lineage’.

The two interact, of course – the observation that one generation was Anglican (Church in Wales) and the next ‘chapel’ (Nonconformist) not only says something about changing social, family and even political conditions; it is also a clue as to which records to investigate.

Definitions

Properly, pedigree charts start with one individual and trace the ancestry backwards through time. These are sometimes called ‘birth-briefs’ and end up looking like an ice-cream cone (if laid out vertically) or a megaphone (if set down horizontally). Descendant charts or trees take the other approach – from one pair of ancestors at the top fanning out to a confusing tangle of distantly related nth cousins at the bottom. Each of these is a useful visual aid – but no more than that. The end point of any research project is information, not merely a diagram.

There are blank charts and other material to help with this listed here.

Be clear about your aims

One thing is certain about genealogy and family history – it can become an all-consuming passion. However, it can also swamp you with information, paper, file boxes and computerised data. Everything you discover will lead you onto more tantalising snippets, interesting ancestors, new connections and, ultimately, the whole sweep of human history. It is utterly absorbing, but can also be maddeningly complicated.

Every genealogist or family historian has discovered, or will at some point, that there is simply no sensible way to fit hundreds of interlinked individuals onto one chart the size of a roll of wallpaper, and no filing system that works without bursting at the seams. Even if you only search back five generations from yourself, and each generation has two siblings on each side of the family, that’s over 250 people, without worrying about the children of your great-aunts and great-uncles and so on. Imagine the documentation associated with these, if you had the certificates for every birth, marriage and death, every census, military service and occupational record, and every will. You would need a library.

There is a solution, though, and it requires three things:

1.  Know where you want to go and stick to it: if your aim is to track the male line back to a certain point, then do just that; if you want to find all descendants of one person, then make that your goal; if you decide to find every instance of a surname back to a particular year or in a particular place (a one-name study), then decide that’s it – do not get sidetracked by interesting byways, but do note them and come back to them as a separate project.

2.  The best way to swallow an elephant is one bite at a time: if it all seems too much (and it will) then concentrate on solving one aspect; if it defies solution, shelve it, move on and come back to it later.

3.  Organisation is all: keep good records, have a decent but simple filing system, organise your computer files properly and buy a robust genealogy database programme (Chapter 16).

Do these things, following the recommendations in this book, and you just might save your life, sanity, marriage or whatever you value most – after your genealogy project, of course.

STEP ONE – Start with what you know

Almost every genealogy book, course and how-to guide starts with this advice. Generally, it’s sensible – you and your family are already the experts on your family history. It is likely that you will be able to get reliable dates and places for births, marriages and deaths back to grandparents and even further. There may well be documents (certificates, wills, letters, inscriptions in family Bibles) as well as diaries, newspaper clippings and photographs. By talking to older relatives and family friends, and showing them photographs and records, you may trigger memories and elicit more information. Ask where deceased relatives are buried and visit the graves, to photograph or record the headstone information or lair records. But there are dangers, complications and pitfalls.

First, memory is a very good, if selective, editor. A family story, repeated by many relatives, may be wrong in detail, embroidered over time or just plain invented. What seems to be a crucial piece of information, repeated by a number of people you talk to, may turn out to be no more than hearsay, or even a carefully constructed lie. A family that has spent years trying to trace a great-uncle who had ‘gone abroad to work’ may be less than delighted to be told he had in fact died while serving time in prison.

Second, different family members may have very different views of an ancestor. The grandfather who seemed stern but upright to one may have been a brutal bully to another. A beloved aunt may have been an appalling mother or an ungrateful daughter.

Third, you may well discover a long-buried secret or an inconvenient piece of information that certain family members may prefer to forget or have spent years assiduously covering up, and they will not be pleased with you for bringing it into the light of day. An illegitimacy, a dead child, an earlier marriage, an abandoned family, disinherited offspring, debts, bankruptcies, collapsed business ventures, dishonourable war service, problems with drink, police records, illnesses, suspicious deaths, murders, suicides, the important job that turns out to be not what was claimed, violence, child abuse, disagreements over a will, stolen property – all of these may emerge, as well as other long-suppressed skeletons. You run the risk of alienating as many people as you delight. It is not uncommon for one side of the family to want to know something and for another side to be furious when it is out in the open. On the other hand, your researches may be the instrument for bringing together branches of a family who haven’t spoken for years over some now-forgotten and irrelevant slight or misunderstanding.

Fourth, if you choose to start from some supposed distant ancestor (‘we’re all descended from Owain Glyndwr, last native Prince of Wales’ is not untypical) and work forwards to try to establish the link with living persons, it is more than likely you will hit a brick wall or end up researching some other family entirely. If the presumed great-great-great-grandfather had seven children, and so did each of them, which of these forty-nine branches do you track? Generally it is better to research backwards in time, one generation at a time. You can always explore collateral branches later, as a separate project.

Fifth, check it hasn’t been done before. Another family member may have been an amateur or professional genealogist and collected a great deal of information. But do check every statement and assumption! Also, there may be a printed or manuscript family history out there in some local library or archive. Finding these may save time and effort. They may also be completely bogus.

Lists of family histories and pedigrees are held in various places and by numerous bodies – the Society of Genealogists (London), the Guild of One Name Studies, the College of Arms, local libraries and archives, the National Library of Wales, university libraries and others. Look at Chapter 4 and follow the links, but also check catalogues such as The Genealogist’s Guide, available via the public library. And, of course, look on the Internet but do not accept anything undocumented, regardless of how many times you see it repeated (because all repeats will probably have a single source, which may be wrong).

STEP TWO – Get charting

As early as possible, start sketching out a family tree. You will probably need two versions – a ‘drop-line’ pedigree chart for yourself (or whoever is the starting point) working backwards and a descendant tree from a specific ancestor. These would show, where possible, full names (with maiden surnames for the females), dates and places of birth, marriage and death, address at census dates and occupations. Use a large piece of paper, use a pencil, leave room for additions and be prepared to redraw it often. Or, use a genealogy programme to organise the data and print charts.

Don’t wait until the end of your research to produce a final, definitive family tree or family history narrative. Genealogical projects are never finished, and there is always more information to add.

Be prepared to copy or print ongoing versions of the work in progress and send it to relatives and others. This may, in itself, jog memories further.

STEP THREE – Arrange your material

Note everything you find, even the failed searches and blind alleys and false leads. This will save time and effort later when you find yourself heading off up the same garden path. Document every source as fully as possible and photocopy, photograph, scan, download or transcribe fully every document and record you find, writing the reference number on it.

Print, and keep all of these in a flexible, easy-to-access place. One good and flexible method is to take all the materials for one family and arrange it under the headings of Censuses, Births, Marriages, Deaths, Wills, Newspapers, Photographs and so on, chronologically in each section (i.e. not according to the person). A filing cabinet will probably be essential at some point. Until then, a system of folders, ring binders and file boxes should do. Use a bound (not loose-leaf) book for your notes, which you will type up or copy later into your filing system. (See here.)

Don’t forget the female line

for a variety of reasons – to do with land and property inheritance, the transfer of a name, the way documents are recorded and so on – family trees often concentrate on the male line. But there is no reason not to follow the female line too, if you wish. It is 50 per cent of everyone’s genetic inheritance, after all.

Using the Internet

There is no question that the Internet has transformed genealogy and family history studies. Apart from more and more records and indexes to records appearing online, it is also possible to track down and keep in contact with a vast network of family and contacts around the world. With an email list of relatives and others interested, it is possible to share and contribute information. More and more surnames and areas have their own dedicated family history websites, online newsgroups and bulletin boards. To find the local family history society (FHS) for your area of interest, see the Chapter 4 and consult the website of the Federation of Family History Societies (www.ffhs.org.uk) as well as GENUKI (www.genuki.co.uk), the Guild of One-Name Studies (the ‘GOONS’ – www.one-name.org) and other places suggested.

Public records

Despite the scale of Internet genealogical material, it still represents only a fraction of the totality. Ultimately, if you want to pursue family history to the next level of detail and precision, you are going to have to look at original records. You may be able to see them online, on microfilm or microfiche, or you may have to seek out the real thing, such as original parish registers – wonderful historic documents, handwritten in copperplate script (if you’re lucky!) and redolent of the past.

Britain has an extraordinary depth and breadth of public records. For family history, the most important are the censuses, then records of birth/baptism, marriage and death/burial (BMD). As noted above and elsewhere, the key date here is 1837, when statutory civil registration began in England and Wales. Before that, baptisms, marriages and burials were recorded in parish registers, some of which go back to the sixteenth century. (A similar system of civil registration was inaugurated in Scotland in 1855. In Ireland the records are patchier, because some censuses, wills and church archives were destroyed during the Civil War in 1922, but there is civil registration information from about 1854.) It can be hard to trace back family history beyond the generation born in the 1830s unless you belong to a well-documented line of landowners, nobility or royalty, or if the local church was especially punctilious about keeping – and maintaining – its records.

Such records will help you to fix the precise details (if not always 100 per cent accurately) about your ancestors: dates, occupations, where they lived – the bare bones of their histories, if not much else. You can consult the indexes to births, deaths and marriages, and order photocopies of the certificates; for English and Welsh records, you can do this through TNA, by going in person or via the Internet (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk). A large proportion of the indexes for England and Wales have been transcribed, and are accessible through www.freebmd.org.uk or commercial websites (see below). However, actual certificates have to be purchased for delivery by post (see Chapter 5).

You can get further details of your ancestors from the census returns. A national census has taken place in Britain every decade since 1801 (except 1941) and they are available up to 1911. These returns provide a fascinating snapshot of households, the names and ages of the residents, the relationships between them, their occupations and where they were born. The census returns are released to the public after a century has elapsed. You can see Welsh census returns for 1851 through to 1901 on microfilm at county records offices, or, for a modest fee, you can download them from official or licensed websites; some of these records have also been transcribed into print (see Chapter 5).

There are many other forms of records beyond this, any of which could help you to fill in vital gaps in your knowledge (military records, wills, tax records, company records, electoral rolls, overseas civil records etc.). Most of these cannot be seen on the Internet, but you can find out where they are located by using websites such as:

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk (Britain);

www.archon.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon (UK government gateway to repositories of archives);

www.a2a.org.uk (the England and Wales strand of the UK archives network).

Are we there yet?

Remember that genealogy is the history of the future – and you are writing it. You are not just doing this for your own amusement. Your research is part of your family’s legacy and future generations will either praise you or curse you depending on how good your work is and whether it can be accessed.

If you are intending to conduct professional genealogical research, you will naturally be expected to produce correct, well-indexed, properly assembled material with all ‘facts’ checked and documented and all records presented neatly and accessibly. But even if this is just a hobby, start with the same professional attitude, and your hard work will stand the test of time.

Bant â chi (Off you go, then!)

2

The Welsh – A Genealogist’s Perspective

What is Wales and who are the Welsh?

Wales, the nation-state or geographical area, is intimately connected with the people called Welsh. Peoples are generally identified by geography, kinship (however loose) and language. In this case, the geographical definition of Wales is relatively simple – as a peninsula, it has an obvious boundary formed by drawing a more-or-less straight line from an inlet of the Irish Sea near Chester, south to the Bristol Channel. The actual eastern border with England is largely as defined by the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–42, based on the boundaries of medieval Lordships of the March. It follows the defensive line called Offa’s Dyke, possibly established in the eighth century, but perhaps based on an earlier Roman structure built by Septimius Severus, Roman Emperor around 200. Offa’s Dyke separated the ancient Welsh kingdom of Powys from the Anglian kingdom of Mercia, but about 40 miles from the north coast the modern border takes a diversion to the east from this. Strangely, the actual Welsh perimeter has never been formally confirmed by a Boundary Commission, although it is formed by the borders of the easternmost counties. There are some amusing anomalies – for example, Knighton is separated from its railway station, and in the village of Llanymynech the boundary runs straight through a pub.

Today, Wales is separated into twenty-two unitary areas but is thought of as having thirteen historic counties (see Chapter 4). It is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. However, it is not a separate country (as Scotland is), but is a principality of England. Its citizens are British citizens.

The other way to define Wales is where the Welsh (Cymry) lived and live. But who are they?

The Welsh

The term ‘Welsh’ defines the ethnic group native to Wales and associated with the Welsh language, but even that isn’t straightforward. There was nothing that could reasonably be called a separate ‘Welsh nation’ until the Romans withdrew from Britain in the late fourth to mid-fifth centuries. They had met tribes in Wales that they called Deceangli, Demetae, Ordovices and Silures. However, these inhabitants were no different from anyone else in southern Britain – they were all Britons, speaking the common language, British. This is a Celtic tongue of the Brythonic group, which also includes Breton and Cornish. It is distinguished from the Goidelic group, comprising Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Manx. The Celtic tongue and the associated culture probably first arrived in Britain in the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age (around 1,200 BC), although DNA evidence suggests that this might be a cultural overlay of an Indo-European language and cultural shift onto pre-existing inhabitants.

These original inhabitants of Britain were mainly indigenous European Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) hunter gatherers, with a later and smaller Neolithic (New Stone Age) farming population. It seems, from various strands of evidence, that after the last ice age (8,000 BC) a small population survived in Iberia (present-day Spain and Portugal) and spread throughout Europe during the Mesolithic period (up to 5,000 BC). Neolithic incomers were from further east in Europe. The Welsh themselves consider themselves Celts with a heritage traced back to the Iron Age tribes, superimposed to some extent by Romano-British culture and a language that has some Latin influence.

The prototype of the Welsh language was spoken farther afield – as far north as Strathclyde and the Lothians, where it remained even after the encroachments from Ireland of the Gaelic Scotii and their Goedelic language into Argyll in the fifth and sixth centuries. It surprises many Scots that William Wallace’s native language was one cognate with Welsh, and that ‘Wallace’ itself may mean ‘Welsh’, which is from the Germanic walha and indicates ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’ and is much the same word as ‘Gaulish’. It also surprises many Welsh that their great early poem, Y Gododdin, was written in the Brythonic kingdom of Gododdin, which extended from the Tyne to the area around Stirling, with its capital at Din Eidyn (Edinburgh), and which rubbed up against the genetically and linguistically distinct Picts of Fife, Angus and the Mearns (Kincardineshire).

After the Romans left, Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain and gradually pushed west, possibly wiping out a large proportion of the indigenous population and forcing the remainder west. This makes the peoples of Wessex, Wales, Cumbria, Strathclyde and Lothian the original Britons; what became the ‘English’ were Germanic invaders who undertook a form of ethnic cleansing. So much for the claims of the British National Party to represent ‘the original inhabitants’.

But if the Welsh are the Britons, why do they not call themselves that? There is evidence of the early use of the term Brythoniaid (Britons), but the first use of Kymry (which refers to the place, not the people) is in a poem from the 630s – around the time that the Brythonic language had changed to Welsh – and may have included the northern areas listed above. That explains the name of the region known as Cumbria, and the Brythonic language used there as Cumbric. Eventually Cymru came to indicate the land now called Wales, and Cymry the people. This makes sense – if ‘Wales’ derives from the a word meaning ‘stranger’ in the Romanised world, Cymru and Cymry come from the Brythonic word combrogi, meaning ‘fellow-countrymen’, a much more comfortable term than the English words Welsh and Wales, with their implications of ‘foreign’ and ‘strange’. Modern Welsh has two words for the English: Saeson (singular Sais), originally meaning ‘Saxon’, and the less commonly used Eingl, meaning ‘Angles’. The Welsh word for the English language is Saesneg and for England is Lloegr.

Of course, there have been later overlays too, both cultural and linguistic. Scandinavians invaded (as Vikings) and settled from the ninth century, as did the Normans (North-men, themselves descended from Vikings in northern France) after 1066; both of these had a much greater influence on language than the Romans. Any traces of Latin we now find in English are echoes of the language of Rome in Norman French, imports from the medieval church into law, and ‘scholarly borrowings’ after the Renaissance. It was the Normans who had the largest direct influence on the land and people of Wales, as Anglo-Normans were given lands in Wales and encouraged to settle there. There is a so-called ‘Landsker Line’ dividing the ‘Englishry’ and ‘Welshry’ of Pembrokeshire, and similar terms are used for parts of Gower.

Welsh identity in censuses and other surveys

The term ‘Welsh’ also applies to those from Wales and of Welsh ancestry who identify themselves or are identified as sharing a cultural, linguistic, geographical and ancestral heritage (as in ‘Australian-Welsh’). Denied a chance to describe themselves as ‘Welsh’ in the 2001 census, about 14 per cent overall actually wrote on the form that they were ethnically Welsh (27 per cent in Gwynedd, 23 per cent in Carmarthenshire, 22 per cent in Ceredigion and 19 per cent in the Isle of Anglesey). The Welsh fought for the inclusion of added questions in 2011, and got: What is your country of birth? (with ‘Wales’ as an option), How would you describe your national identity? (‘Welsh’ and ‘English’ were among the options), What is your ethnic group? (‘White Welsh/English/Scottish/Northern Irish/British’ was an option) and Can you understand, speak, read or write Welsh? At the time of writing (2012), there is no analysis available.

In 2001/02 the Labour Force Survey found that 87 per cent of Wales-born residents claimed to be ethnically Welsh. (The residential population includes 30 per cent born outside Wales.) Interestingly, a separate study by Oxford University identified that 18 per cent of respondents thought of themselves as ‘Welsh and not British’, 20 per cent ‘more Welsh than British’ and 39 per cent ‘equally Welsh and British’. In general, younger people are more likely to identify themselves as ‘Welsh’ in some way. This Welsh/British distinction is at odds with history, but is indicative of the strong sense of identity that pervades what some refer to, rather dismissively, as ‘Welsh Wales’.

Percentage of Welsh speakers by principal area.

Language

Speaking Welsh is a central component of Welsh identity – more than speaking Gaelic or Scots is in Scotland. The Welsh themselves speak of Cymry Cymraeg (the Welsh-speaking Welsh), Cymry di-Gymraeg (the non-Welsh-speaking Welsh) and Saeson (English, not Welsh at all).

There is no question that the number of Welsh speakers in Wales is rising – there was a time when it was actively discouraged, especially in schools. The 2001 census (see above) may not have directly enumerated those considering themselves ‘Welsh’, but it did assess language, as did that of 2011. About 20 per cent of the population (so about 600,000 out of roughly 3 million) claimed to be fluent in Welsh, a further 28 per cent claimed to understand it. The increase over the last decade is most marked in large towns such as Cardiff (Caerdydd), and in the Rhondda. Welsh speakers in Gwynedd and Ceredigion have decreased, but these areas have had the greatest influx of new, non-Welsh residents. There is also evidence that non-Welsh-speaking residents moving to rural North Wales have diluted the language base – and also driven up property values so that Welsh-speaking ‘locals’ are displaced. About a quarter of Welsh residents are from outside Wales.

This means that Welsh is the first language in much of the rural north and west (the Isle of Anglesey, Gwynedd, central Denbighshire) followed by Powys, Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire, then North Pembrokeshire and western Glamorgan. Historically, this matches the places that did not have an influx of incomers for the slate-mining, coal-mining and other industries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there are first-language and fluent speakers all over Wales, including the urbanised south, especially now that Cardiff is home to many national organisations in the public and private sectors who need Welsh speakers.

There is hardly anyone who speaks only Welsh and almost everyone is truly bilingual in English and Welsh, but many Welsh speakers prefer to use Welsh rather than English. This also depends on the area – English is commoner in South Wales and large towns, and Welsh in North Wales and rural areas. Visitors often notice what linguistics specialists call ‘code-switching’, a shift from one language to the other depending on context, companions, presence or absence of other Welsh speakers and so on. Furthermore, because of the purposive promotion of the Welsh language, and the existence of the Welsh Assembly (with devolved but limited powers of self-government), learning and using the Welsh language is important in career and cultural openings.

The growth of interest in the language (and the use of it) since 1945 mirrors a rise in Welsh nationalism, the emergence of the political party Plaid Cymru, the increased activities of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society), the existence of Welsh-only television and radio stations, road signs in Welsh and the teaching of Welsh in schools.

Surnames and population

Meat and drink to genealogists, surnames are an important aspect of identity. Strangely (according to a survey of Welsh surnames commissioned by the Welsh Assembly) only a third of the population of Wales have a family name of Welsh origin. The equivalent figure in the rest of the UK is about 5 per cent, and not much less in New Zealand, Australia and the USA. Over 16 million people worldwide are considered to be of Welsh ancestry – probably an underestimate.

Welsh surnames

Six out of the top ten commonest surnames in Britain are Welsh. The question is, though – why is the proportion of Welsh surnames in Wales not higher? (See Chapter 3.)

The population of Wales grew from less than 600,000 in 1801 to almost twice that in 1851, and twice that again by 1911. This trend was common during the Industrial Revolution in Britain –death rates (especially infant mortality) fell and birth rates were stable, but migration into Wales was marked. Most immigrants were English, but Irish also figured, as did ethnic groups from elsewhere, notably Italians migrating to the South Wales coal mines.

Wales in the time of Edward I.

In the twentieth century, as in the rest of Britain, there has been immigration from the British Commonwealth of African-Caribbean and Asian ethnic groups, and a more recent influx from new accession countries of the European Union such as Poland.

Partly this is to do with land inheritance. In Wales, and indeed for Catholics in Ireland, unlike in England (except Kent), a man’s estate was divided equally among his sons – a custom known as ‘gavelkind’. Someone’s two sons who pass their share onto their two sons and so on could easily result in a number of unworkably small plots of land. So they left the land.

DNA

There is no particularly Welsh genetic pattern. The commonest marker is R1b (about 85 per cent) as with most Britons, who, after all, arrived from the Iberian Peninsula in the Mesolithic and the Neolithic times. Bryan Sykes in Blood of the Isles and Stephen Oppenheimer in The Origins of the British, summarise the genetic evidence. Oppenheimer claims that 96 per cent of lineages in Llangefni (North Wales) derive ultimately from Iberia. Y-chromosome markers amongst the Welsh, as with the Irish, show a common ancestry with the Basques of northern Spain and south-western France, perhaps with more Neolithic input than these. For more detail, start at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_(Y-DNA).

Religion

The Anglican Church in Wales is the single largest denomination, but there is a long tradition of Nonconformists and Methodists, as well as other denominations such as the Presbyterian Church in Wales or Catholicism; about 70 per cent of the population consider themselves nominally Christian. There has been a Jewish community in Swansea from about 1730, but only Cardiff now has a sizeable Jewish population (some 2,000). The largest non-Christian faith in Wales today is Islam – there are about 25,000 members of some forty mosques (the first was in Cardiff in 1860). The 2001 census recorded about 7,000 practising ‘other religions’, including neo-Druidism, a form of the pre-Christian religion of Wales (this is not related to the bardic Druids of the Gorsedd at the National Eisteddfod of Wales).

As far as observance goes, the 2001 census showed that fewer than 10 per cent of the Welsh regularly attend church or chapel (lower than in England or Scotland). However, for the genealogist, that’s not the point. Regardless of religious faith or none, people did tend to document their vital sacraments (baptism, marriage, burial) in the records of various churches. Knowing which is important – and, in Wales, this is complicated by the high proportion in Nonconformist denominations, not all of which kept good records, maintained them or have made them available (Chapter 6).

Welsh emigration

There has always been migration between Wales and the rest of Britain, in both directions. During the Industrial Revolution there were hundreds of thousands of Welsh who moved to work in the larger cities of England and Scotland or the coal mines in the north of England. There were also English, Scottish and Irish workers who migrated to Welsh cities such as Merthyr Tydfil or ports such as Pembroke, and to work in slate or coal mines. As a result, much of the British population today have ancestry from Wales. Therefore, Welsh surnames are fairly common in the rest of the UK, and many Welsh have surnames from Scotland, England and Ireland. The upshot is that it is rare, except in Welsh-speaking areas, to find anyone with exclusively Welsh ancestry, and there may be a need to consult records from other parts of the UK. It also means that genealogical investigations in Scotland, England or Ireland may lead back to Wales. (See also Chapter 9.)

Overseas emigration

Some Welsh moved to the European continent, but to rather specific places and for rather specific reasons. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a movement of contract miners from Wales to northern France, especially to the coal-mining towns of Pas-de-Calais. There was not the same tradition of trade and migration with the Baltic and Scandinavian states as can be found with the Scots. However, Donetsk in the Ukraine was founded by John Hughes, an engineer and entrepreneur from Merthyr Tydfil, in 1869. Hughes built a steel plant and coal mines in the region and the town was named Yuzovska (or Yusovska) as ‘Yuz’ was as close as Russians or Ukrainians could get to Hughes).

Compared to the Irish, relatively few Welsh have emigrated to the USA; those that did moved predominantly to the coal-mining areas of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Jackson County, Ohio, has been called ‘Little Wales’ and Malad City, Idaho (originally a Welsh Mormon settlement), claims to have more people per head of Welsh ancestry than anywhere outside Wales – the high school football team is the Malad Dragons and flies the Welsh flag. About 1.75 million Americans claim they have Welsh ancestry – more than half the present population of Wales.

By the way, there is no evidence whatsoever for the legendary Prince Madog reaching North America in 1170 and founding the Mandan, a Native American tribe of the central USA.

As for Canada, Welsh settlers (and later Patagonian Welsh) arrived in Newfoundland in the early 1900s, and there are many Welsh-founded towns in Labrador. Almost 500,000 Canadians identified themselves as being of Welsh ancestry in the 2006 census.

The famous Welsh settlement, Y Wladfa in Patagonia, Argentina, is dealt with in Chapter 9. Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil was where Thomas Benbow Phillips of Tregaron established a Welsh community of about 100 in 1852. Individual Welsh may also have emigrated for particular reasons – as missionaries and evangelists, in the armed forces and so on, so records of these activities are valuable.

All of these aspects are considered in later chapters. But it should be clear that Welsh genealogy, as well being a study in its own right, touches many other genealogies worldwide. Ignore it at your genealogical peril! (See also Chapter 9.)

Further reading

John Davies, A History of Wales (Penguin, 1990).

Norman Davies, The Isles (Papermac, 1991).

Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story (Robinson Publishing, 2007).

Bryan Sykes, Blood of the Isles (Corgi, 2007).

Gwyn A. Williams, The Welsh in their History (Croom Helm, 1982).

3

Welsh Surnames

When you are up to your neck in the undergrowth of a Welsh family history project, it can seem that everyone is surnamed Davies, Evans, Jones or Williams, all the men are David, Evan, John or William, all the women Anne, Gladys, Mary, Megan or Jane, and everyone in the same generation of cousins is named after the grandfather.

Well, that’s the way it is. But it may help to understand how and when this came about.

Welsh surnames

Surnames as we recognise them today – passed down unchanged from father to children – are a relatively recent phenomenon. In Wales, they did not really exist until the Elizabethan times, before which people were known mainly by patronymics, place names and/or characteristics, like Rys du ap Llewelyn ap Kydwgan o Garog (a place in Cardiganshire) whose son was Rys Vychan Gentu (vychan or fychan later became Vaughan, which means ‘the small’ or ‘the younger’ in Welsh – and if you’ve ever heard of the Gentoo Penguin, reflect that pen gwyn is Welsh meaning, literally, ‘head of white’, which indeed the Gentoo has).

Not everyone Welsh is called Jones, and not every Jones is Welsh

There are relatively few Welsh surnames – fewer than forty names account for about 95 per cent of the Welsh, wherever they have ended up. That is not to say that everyone called ‘Jones’ (son of John) or ‘Williams’ (son of William) is of Welsh origin – they could be English, or simply have assumed the surname over time – but someone called Lloyd or Llewellyn and their variants most probably is. The most typically ‘Welsh’ surnames – Davies, Evans, Jones, Thomas and Williams – are also in the top ten found in England to this day, not as a result of Welsh out-migration, but because some of them also originated in England, long before they arose in Wales, in as early as the fourteenth century.

Now, in the twenty-first century, only a third of the Welsh population has a surname that would be considered of Welsh origin, but that is still six or seven times as many as in the rest of the UK. Many of them have spawned variants no longer thought of as being originally Welsh – the very old forename Madog has become Maddock, Maddox, Mattocks, Maddick and even Muddock (although considered to be from Suffolk, the earliest record is actually in Shropshire on the Welsh border).

Top 100 Welsh surnames

For the record, here are the top 100 surnames in Wales, in descending order of incidence, in the 1850s – about the time we can start to find census (Chapter 5) and statutory registration records (Chapter 6). The first ten account for more than half of all Welsh surnames, and the first thirty-five (the first column, below) for over 80 per cent.

Such lists are never perfect, vary according to locale (there are very few Joneses in the far south-west, for example) and may include or exclude certain variants. For instance, should Jones and Johns be considered separate, as they have a similar origin? As Preece and Price both arise from ap Rhys, should they be considered separately? Is everyone called Howell/Hywel necessarily related? However, armed with this list and knowing the origin of the name, it may be possible to track name changes back through the centuries.

Jones

Griffin

Bound

Williams

Bevan

Gwilt

Davies

Meredith

Beddoe

Thomas

Preece

Dacey

Evans

Prosser

Pendry

Robert(s)

Griffith

Reese

Hughes/Huw

Pierce

Brodrick

Lewis/Lewys

Reece

Brick

Morgan

Probert

Knill

Griffin/Griffith(s) –

Floyd

Evens

anglicised form of Gruffudd

Tudor

Gilliam

Owen/Owain

Breeze

Ace

Edward(s)

Pryce

Donne

Rees

Rosser

Bevans

James

Brice

Raikes

Jenkins

Gittins

Cleaves

Price

Beynon

Traylor

Morris/Morys

Mathias

Embrey

Richard(s)

Broderick

Leafe

Lloyd

Prowse

Connick

Phil(l)ip(s)

Gillam

Pumphrey

Parry

Morgans

Boore

David

Havard

Burris

Harris/Harries

Eynon

Games

John(s)

Beaven

Demery

Powel(l)

Coughlin

Glyn

Pritchard

Phoenix

Mabe

Howell(s)/Hywel

Press

Gwyn

Watkin(s)

Prichard

Scale

Rowlands

Gerrish

Yandle

Bowen

Prothero

Hargest

Humphreys

Speake

Beedles

Ellis

Breese

Boyde

Pugh

Cadogan

Skone

Llewelyn/Llywelyn

Hopkins

Origins of surnames

Surnames arise in a number of ways. In his classic British Family Names (1894) Henry Barber identified that ‘most surnames will be found to come under one or other of the following headings’:

1.  Nicknames

2.  Clan or tribal names

3.  Place names

4.  Official names

5.  Trade names

6.  Christian names

7.  Foreign names

8.  Foundling names

Modern practice tends to regroup these into six main origin groups (in no particular order):

•  Fealtic (taken in order to show fealty to, or accepting the protection of, the local chief or landholder – as with many Scottish ‘Mac’ names, which may indicate nothing genetic, but simply that the person lived on the land of, accepted the protection of and swore loyalty to MacSomebody).

•  Descriptive (‘Small’, ‘White’, ‘Armstrong’).

•  Occupational (‘Smith’, Fletcher’, Baker’).

•  Landed (indicating ownership or heritable possession – ‘of Cardigan’, ‘de la Zouch’).

•  Locational (merely coming from – ‘Glasgow’, ‘Bristol’, Kent’).

Consider the ‘surnames’ of Robin Hood and his Merry Men as they have come down to us in myth and literature:

•Much the Miller’s son – Patronymic: family name combined with a trade name.

•Little John (John Little) – Descriptive: describing a physical characteristic.

•Will Scarlet – Descriptive or occupational: possibly referring to red hair, or he was a scarlet dyer (but could be a corruption of Scathelock, his actual surname).

•Friar Tuck – Occupational or status: in this case, clerical.

•Alan a Dale – Locational: ‘Alan from the Dale’.

•Robin Hood – Descriptive: from ‘Robin in the wood’. But he was also reputedly Sir Robert of Locksley, son of the Earl of Huntingdon, indicating landed territorial possession.

Let’s take each of these in turn:

1. Patronymic

These are surnames derived from the name of a father or grandfather. Medieval England and English-speaking Wales had only some twenty popular male first names, the commonest being John. Richard, the son of John, might be known as Richard, John’s son (Johnson), but by this scheme, Richard’s son William would become William, Richard’s son (Richardson) or even just William Richards. Over time, it became convenient and legally important to maintain the patronymic down the entire line.

There are also diminutives of the father’s or grandfather’s first name – Bartlett (Little Bartholomew), Hewitt or Hewlett (little Hugh), Perkin (Little Peter), Wilkin (Little William) and so on.

Sometimes there were changes in spelling – Anderson (Andrew’s son), Harris (Harry’s son), Henderson (Henry’s son), Hughes (Hugh’s son), Nixon (Nicholas’s son), Simpson (Simon’s son), Patterson (Patrick’s son), Tennyson (Dennis’s son) and Jones (the Welsh version of Johnson, which became the most common surname). Furthermore, the final ‘-son’ was often elided to a single ‘-s’ – Williamson becoming Williams, Evanson becoming Evans and so on.

After the Norman invasion of England in 1066 some surnames began with Fitz (from fils, French for ‘son’), especially in Ireland – Fitzhugh, Fitzgerald – as is clear from the Limerick Chronicle, 22 May 1769: ‘Last Tuesday James MOLONEY Fitzandrew …’. Later, Fitz was used for illegitimate but acknowledged offspring. For instance, King William IV (1765–1837, r. 1830) had no surviving legitimate children at his death (which is how Victoria came to be queen), although he was survived by eight of the ten illegitimate children he had by the popular actress, Dorothea Bland, better known as Mrs Jordan, with whom he cohabited for twenty years. They were all surnamed FitzClarence as William had been Duke of Clarence.

In Scotland and Ireland, surnames often began with Mac (Gaelic for ‘son of’ or ‘descendant of’), such as MacGregor (Gregor’s descendant) or MacPherson (descendant of the parson). Incidentally, there is no distinction between Mac and its contractions Mc and M’. It is not the case that one is Scottish and the other Irish.

The Irish O’ (O’Dwyer, O’Malley) indicated ‘grandson of’, or loosely ‘descended from’, in contrast to the prefix Mac or Mc, which would mean son of the ancestor specified. Scottish Gaelic has a similar word for grandson (ogha) but this has not made it into many surnames.) Gaelic names and customs were outlawed during the reign of Edward IV (from 1465) for Irishman living within the ‘Pale’ (the area around Dublin); all had to take English names or forfeit their possessions. Many refused, and it took another 200 years of persecution and ridicule to make the Gaelic forms all but disappear – the anglicised version of Ua Dalaigh or O’Dalaigh became O’Daly and in Scottish Gaelic we find MacFhearghais (MacFergus) or Fearghasdan (Ferguson), MacFhionnlaigh (MacFinlay) and MacDomhnall (MacDonald or MacDonell).

The Welsh equivalent is ap or ab (before a vowel) as in ap John, which became Johns/Jones but also Upjohn; ap Rhys, which became Prees/Price; ab Owain, which turned into Bowen; and ab Ieuan, which became Bevan. The female equivalent is ferch (daughter of), such as Cerys ferch Dafydd ap Rydderch (Cerys, daughter of David, son of Roderick) and after marriage women would normally keep these maiden names – precisely because there was no ‘surname’ to adopt.

This patronymic system is still the pattern found in, say, Iceland, where Eric the son of Magnus becomes Eric Magnusson, and his son Thorvald, Thorvald Ericsson. Eric’s wife might be Inge Baldursdottir. Eric and Inge’s daughter, Bjork, would be Bjork Ericsdottir but it is also possible, although uncommon, to make a girl’s last name from the name of the mother – Bjork Ingesdottir.

The same naming tradition existed in Sweden and Norway until the second part of the nineteenth century. In certain areas of western Sweden, it continued even longer.

In Italy d’ or di indicates ‘son of’ – ‘di Rollo’, ‘Dicaprio’.

Hungarians, for reasons best known to themselves, reverse the name order, so Gyula, the son of Bartok Bela, would be Bartok Gyula. A married woman, formally, takes a feminine form of her husband’s Christian name, so Maria, wife of Rudnai Peter becomes Rudnai Peternye.

Remember also that in many Germanic countries, the wife adopts any professional titles of her husband, and all titles are given, so it is possible to meet Frau Professor Professor Doctor Doctor Schubert.

It is noticeable in the list of Welsh surnames here that the commonest thirty-three (all in the first column) are all patronymic except Lloyd, which comes from llwyd (grey). The patronymics tend, in the main, to fall into three categories.

•  Those derived from Christian names also common in England – like Jones, Thomas, Davies and Williams – or directly from Anglo-Norman names – as with Hughes, from Huw, the Welsh form copied from the notorious Hugh le Despenser (father and son both) who did such damage to Wales in the early 1300s; other examples of this are Robert and Richard.

•  Surnames that originally contained the prefix ap (meaning ‘son of’ in the same way as the Scottish–Irish ‘Mc’ or ‘Mac’). Examples of these are Pritchard (ap Richard) and Bowen (ap Owen with the ‘p’ hardened to a ‘b’).

•  Surnames from English sources that became well known in parts of Wales, due to in-migration, or assimilation by native Welsh.

The patronymic system eventually ended and the father’s name came to be treated as a surname to be passed on. For example, William ap John Thomas, standard bearer of King Henry VIII, became known as William Jones. Thomas ap Lewis, son of Lewis ap Sir David, was killed at the Battle of Banbury in 1469 and his son, Lord of the Manor of Raglan in Monmouthshire in 1487, was the first to adopt Lewis as a permanent surname.

At the same time as the patronymic system fell away – around the time of Henry VIII and into the beginning of the seventeenth century – traditional Welsh forenames (see here