Category: Biography & Family History
Biographical and genealogical studies reconstructing individual lives, families and communities through archival records, newspapers, photographs, wills, family papers and other evidence. The emphasis is on placing people within the social worlds of work, kinship, migration, faith and inheritance.
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Arthur Owen Jones: The Welsh Cricketer Who Captained England
There are some historical figures whose names survive because each generation retells their story, and others whose reputations gradually retreat into the footnotes. Arthur Owen Jones belongs largely…
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Nancy Laurie (1840–1915): The Governess Behind a Shrewsbury Photograph
A named Victorian photograph is a small act of resistance against oblivion. The woman in this carte de visite is shown in profile, her hair drawn tightly into…
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Radnor Citizens Advice Bureau: The Passing of a Local Voluntary Culture
When I joined the Radnor Citizens Advice Bureau in Llandrindod Wells in early 2000, I was eighteen years old. At the time, nothing about the office seemed unusual.…
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Robert Owen of Newtown (1771–1858): Industry, Character and the New Moral World
Robert Owen was born above a saddler’s shop in Newtown, Montgomeryshire, and died in the same town eighty-seven years later. Between those two points lay a life spent…
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Owen Owen (1847–1910): The Montgomeryshire Draper Who Built a Retail Empire
The history of nineteenth-century Wales is often told through coal, iron, slate, agriculture, Nonconformity and politics. Yet one of the most important changes of the Victorian age took…
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David Davies (1818–1890) of Llandinam: The Sawyer Who Redrew the Map of Wales
Some nineteenth-century lives are so large that they can obscure the person who lived them. David Davies of Llandinam has become one of those monumental figures, remembered as…
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Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920): The Newtown Draper Who Transformed the Geography of Shopping
Growing up in mid Wales, a trip to Newtown was a big thing, and especially a trip to “Pryce Jones”. By the late 1980s and 1990s the great…
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John Cartwright Jones (1831–1875): Clerical Life, Family Ambition and the Glandwr Inheritance
John Cartwright Jones never became a bishop, a celebrated theologian or a national figure. His clerical career was spent in three comparatively small English parishes, and his life…
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David Jenkins (1850–1891): A Farm Labourer’s Life and Death in Rural Wales
On the afternoon of 13 January 1891, David Jenkins was carrying manure to a field at Camlan, near Dinas Mawddwy. It was ordinary winter work, physically demanding but…
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Hugh Wynn Wilding-Jones (1896–1918): Glandwr’s Lost Heir and the Road to Dojran
Seven days after Lieutenant Hugh Wynn Wilding-Jones died in a military hospital near Salonika, Bulgaria signed an armistice and withdrew from the First World War. He had survived…