Leaving Wales Behind

The meaning of this heading is two-fold. I am "leaving Wales behind" with my next posting about Scotland. And here I'm writing about my ancestors who left Wales in the 1840's, never to see it again. 

Although the above photo was taken recently, it is likely to be a good illustration of what Wales looked like in the 1840s. That is when  my father's ancestors emigrated from the west coast of Wales. An emigration officer of the time, Captain Schamberg, said five years later, "A deep ship will very probably, under ordinary circumstances, be very wet and uncomfortable, and the people will live up to their knees in water."  A passenger said, "It wasn't very nice spending four weeks in a large smelly room. Lots of people felt sick  and it could be very dark."

My ancestors came from two Welsh families that emigrated in the 1840s and settled in the farming and coal mining areas of Jackson and Galliard Counties, Ohio. Who were they, and why did they undertake the arduous journey to an unknown land?  I will attempt to answer those questions with a bit of truthiness. Some of the facts will be made up. 

A young man from the coal-mining area of south Wales (or of the farming area of western Wales) married a young girl from the same area and started a family.  Times were hard, both for coal miners and for farmers. If the young man, a Mr. Jones, was a coal miner, he knew it was backbreaking and dangerous work to mine coal, but it was what he knew how to do. There was a Welsh community in the Appalachian region  of south eastern Ohio where miners were better off. It would have sounded good.  If Mr. Jones was instead a farmer in Wales he was working in poor soil and barely surviving. The Enclosure Acts were allocating to private ownership of the gentry land that had once been considered common. The chance to start life anew in the rich soils of Ohio would have sounded attractive. 

Mr. Jones might have married a young lass by the name of Miss Davis or Miss Morgan or Miss Evans or Miss Jones. There are a few other possibilities, but not many. There are not many different surnames in the small country of Wales. I say that to prepare you for the following two paragraphs.  Feel free to go through them quickly. The details are for the genealogical record. To put it more simply, one family from Cardinghamshire named Davis had a son who married into another family named Davis from Cardinghamshire. They produced my maternal ancestors on my father's side. 

John G. Davis (born John G. Davies in Aberyswyth 1805) took his wife and four daughters from Flymonceitho, Llangeitho Parish, across the Atlantic in 1840. After settling in Jackson County, Ohio, he had a son John J. who married a daughter of John K. Davis (born John K. Davies at Coecefnder, near Lanon 1802).  John K. had five daughters born in Wales, but one of them died on the cross-Atlantic voyage in 1842, and another died soon after. Two more daughters were born in the United States, one of whom, Margaret, became my great-great-great grandmother, or something of the sort, when she married John J. Davis.   That's all we know. 

The Welsh American Community Today

It's likely that most people of Welsh descent think of themselves as of British background, which is accurate (British, but not English). There are about 2 million Americans with Welsh ancestry -- and only 3 million people left in Wales itself. Even more interesting, there are nearly 6 million Americans with Welsh surnames -- and many of them are black. It is thought that when slavery ended many freed blacks took the surnames of Welsh Quaker abolitionists, Jones being a particularly common name.  

Jackson County, Ohio calls itself "the little Wales of Ohio,"  and more specifically is known as Little Cardinghamshire. Welsh was spoken there until the 1950's. The central town of Wellstone, Ohio has an annual Coal Mining Festival every year. They don't mine coal any more, but they do something to celebrate it.  

Bring a few Welsh people together and you have a "gymanfa ganu" or an "Eisteddfod." Both are events related to singing. There are over a thousand "gymanfa ganu" held in Wales each year; in the United States, not so many. These are joyous gatherings for hymn singing in four-part harmony, a tradition important to Dissenters or Noncomformists, as Protestant denominations other than the Anglican Church were known in the early days.    And although there were restrictions in public life on Noncomformists for more than two centuries, since the 1850's Noncomformists have been in the majority in Wales. 

One of the most distinctive features of the Welsh is that singing is a community event. The "Eisteddfod" is an assertive singing competition that is almost like a sport. "Our town has a better community chorus than yours." "Oh, yeah?!  Sez who?  Show up next Sunday and we'll see who has the better singing group!"

After listening to a couple of groups in Llandudno I can vouch for the fact that the Welsh aren't necessarily blessed with better voices than other people. What the Welsh do have is greater enthusiasm for participating in singing. 

Let me end by noting that seven American presidents are known to have Welsh ancestry, starting with Thomas Jefferson. So did John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Add to this list James Garfield, Calvin Coolidge, and Richard Nixon. The Welsh also claim a smidge of Barack Obama. 

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