Family History & Genealogy

Family history is most valuable when it moves beyond names and dates. Used carefully, genealogy can recover class, occupation, religion, migration, kinship, loss, ambition and the communities in which lives took shape.

This developing guide brings together my genealogical and biographical work using archival evidence, family papers, census returns, newspapers, photographs and oral testimony. The aim is not simply to construct pedigrees, but to place individuals back into the social worlds that formed them.

Family history in brief

A Glandwr family group, illustrating how photographs can preserve relationships, generations and household networks.

The strongest genealogical work usually combines several kinds of evidence and asks historical questions as well as genealogical ones.

Identity: establish names, dates, relationships and places carefully before attempting interpretation.
Context: occupations, religion, property, education and community reveal how a person actually lived.
Movement: migration, military service, marriage and work often explain why families appear in different places across generations.
Material evidence: photographs, houses, gravestones, letters and family papers can preserve information absent from official records.
Memory: oral tradition and family stories are valuable evidence, but need to be tested against contemporary sources.
Public history: a well-reconstructed family can illuminate wider questions of class, work, faith, migration and social change.

Where to begin

Nancy Laurie (1840–1915), whose surviving photograph provides a route into work, class, household life and genealogical reconstruction.

These six studies show how genealogy becomes social history when names and relationships are placed back into the worlds of work, property, migration, class, gender and memory.

Gwen Jones of Caeadda, 1841–1926: A Welsh Farming Matriarch, a family-history case study that reconstructs my great-grandmother’s life from censuses, newspapers, wills, photographs and inherited memory.
Esgair Llewelyn, combining genealogy with architecture, farming, migration, women’s work and community life.
The Jones Family of Glandwr Hall, Barmouth, a multi-generational reconstruction of kinship, profession, landownership, inheritance, war and family decline.
Nancy Laurie (1840–1915), showing how one identified photograph can lead into a history of work, class and household life.
Richard Emmett, reconstructing an ordinary Victorian life through poverty, military service, migration and family responsibility.
The Women of Glandwr, placing women, marriage, household strategy and inheritance at the centre of a Victorian family history.

Reconstructing individual lives

William Jones of Glandwr Hall, shown in two surviving nineteenth-century portraits.

Biography built from genealogical sources can recover people who left no memoir and were never considered subjects for formal life writing. Census entries, wills, newspapers, photographs and family relationships can be combined to reconstruct the circumstances in which choices were made.

Gwen Jones of Caeadda, 1841–1926, reconstructing my great-grandmother’s life from census returns, newspapers, probate, family photographs, oral memory and the history of the farm itself.
Diana Hambro, Lady Gibson-Watt (1922–2000), combining genealogy, contemporary newspapers, estate records and personal recollection to recover a life which formal sources often treated mainly through her marriage.
Mary Anne Wilkins Lucas, later Middleton Evans, recovering a woman whose philanthropy and family connections placed her within the civic history of Victorian Llandrindod Wells.
Arthur Owen Jones, tracing a celebrated sporting life back through family, place and the social world that formed him.
Nancy Laurie (1840–1915), reconstructing a governess’s life from a photograph, census evidence and the households in which she worked.
Sister Annunciata Briffa, using family memory and a surviving image to recover a life shaped by faith, vocation and service.
David Jenkins (1850–1891), reconstructing the precarious working life of a Victorian agricultural labourer.
Richard Emmett, tracing one working-class life across industrial England, military service and family settlement.
Athelstan Jasper Blaxland (1880–1963), a family reconstruction connecting genealogy with medicine, war and professional life.
George Roberts Shorto (1836–1905), using family evidence to place military service, law and civic life within a Victorian biography.
Herbert George Flaxman Spurrell (1877–1918), a reconstructed life spanning family connection, science, exploration and wartime service.

Families, place and inheritance

A historic Glandwr family group, illustrating the kinship and household relationships through which inheritance and family memory were carried.

Families existed within places as well as pedigrees. Farms, houses, chapels, occupations and inherited property gave kinship a physical and social setting. Following those settings across generations can reveal how status was built, maintained, lost or transformed.

Thomas Davies of Penlan and Gwernstablau (1864–1930), my great-uncle’s life traced from Caeadda to Penlan and Gwernstablau through family records, farm tenancies, marriage, probate and inherited rural connections.
John Pugh of Glyncaerig (1834–1912): From Farm Labourer’s Son to Montgomeryshire Landowner, the passage from agricultural labour to ownership of Glyncaerig and the links between the Pugh, Jones of Glandwr, Jenkins and Davies farming families.
Caeadda, Llanwrin: Three Centuries of Farming in the Montgomeryshire Uplands, an extended family history anchored in one farm, traced through parish records, estate sales, marriage, tenancy and changing ownership.
The Tragedy of Maescelyn: The Jenkins Family, 1906–1913, reconstructing a family broken by deaths in 1906, the change from farming to agricultural labour and the upbringing of four children among relatives.
The Jones Family of Glandwr Hall, Barmouth, bringing the Glandwr biographies into one family chronology of migration, law, military service, inheritance and the eventual end of the family’s direct association with the Hall.
John Howel (c.1765–1835), using one family to explore the Dolgellau woollen economy, patronymic naming and intergenerational mobility.
William Jones of Glandwr Hall, showing how migration, profession and property could create a new social position.
Trevor Owen Davies (1895–1966), following a Montgomeryshire farming family into education, ministry and wider Welsh public life.
The Llyfnant Valley, using one extended farming family to connect genealogy with the social history, migration and tourist economy of a secluded valley.
Esgair Llewelyn and the Last Prince of Wales, examining how family tradition, landscape and national memory can become intertwined across generations.
The Women of Glandwr, examining kinship, marriage, household influence and inheritance through women who are easily obscured in conventional pedigrees.
William Halse Gatty Jones (1825–1897), migration, marriage, return and the international reach of a Welsh family.
John Cartwright Jones (1831–1875), clerical life, family expectation and the inheritance culture surrounding Glandwr.
Major-General Howel Locke Jones (1835–1907), family, empire, military service and migration across generations.
William Wilding Jones of Glandwr (1855–1942), inheritance, estate adaptation and the pressures placed upon a landed family.
Hugh Wynn Wilding-Jones (1896–1918), inheritance and the destruction of a young family future during the First World War.
Eric Vaughan Wilding-Jones (1899–1942), the final male heir and the end of the Jones family’s direct association with Glandwr.
Gatty Wynne Jones (1859–1913), migration, family connection and the movement from Melbourne and Glandwr into popular culture.
Gattison Jones (1895–1955), a transatlantic family story connecting Glandwr with Broadway and vaudeville.
John Davies of Erglodd (1821–1887), a family and local-history reconstruction shaped by farming, chapel and community service.
Llanwrin: A Montgomeryshire Village, Its People and My Family’s History, the Davies and Jones families, their farms, marriages, parish records and the many ancestral graves in Llanwrin churchyard.

Work, class and migration

Shearing day at Penlan, probably c.1905–1915. Family photographs can preserve evidence not only of individuals, but of work, cooperation and community.

Genealogy becomes especially valuable when it explains how people earned a living and why they moved. Agricultural labour, domestic service, professional careers, military service and urban migration all altered family structures and opportunities.

The White Horse Hotel, Machynlleth: Fire, Farming Families and Life on Maengwyn Street, Evan and Elizabeth Owen’s movement from a Montgomeryshire farm to a South Wales shop and the licensed trade of Machynlleth.
The Ceniarth Farm Dispute of 1900, reconstructing the life of Evan Owen through a contested tenancy, agricultural depression, a court case and his later move from farming to trade.
David Jenkins, a rural labouring life shaped by insecurity and physical work.
Nancy Laurie, domestic employment, class and household life.
Richard Emmett, poverty, military service, movement and eventual family settlement.
William Jones of Glandwr Hall, migration from Wales to London and the relationship between profession, property and status.
Owen Jones Davies (1875–1958): From Caeadda to Wood River, Alberta, a family-based study of transatlantic migration from Caeadda to Alberta, reconstructed from family testimony, census and land records.
Tuberculosis at Ceniarth: The Disease That Devastated a Montgomeryshire Farming Family, 1888–1894, a reconstruction of family bereavements from death records, a farmer’s will and the subsequent history of the Owen family.

Family history as public history

Family research can move beyond the private family tree and contribute to wider public history.

Private family evidence can become public history when it is placed in context. A photograph, memoir or pedigree may begin with one family, but the questions it raises can illuminate occupations, communities and social structures shared by many others.

“My Relations Are Part of a Rich Tapestry of Welsh Heritage”, reflecting on how long-term family research can reach a wider public audience and contribute to Welsh historical memory.
Off the Rails: Why I Wrote the Story of Alfred Jenkins, explaining how the life of one railway worker became a wider study of occupation, family memory and working-class Britain.
Voices from the Uplands: Why I Wrote It and Why It Matters, reflecting on family research as a record of rural Welsh culture and collective memory.
Saving the Soul of Wales: Why We Must Preserve Welsh Family and Chapel Records, considering the preservation of photographs, family papers and chapel records as an essential part of public and family history.

A developing guide to family history and genealogy

Family memorials at Llanwrin, one example of the material evidence through which genealogy can be connected with place and community.

Taken together, these essays show genealogy as a form of historical reconstruction. The purpose is not simply to extend a family tree, but to recover the social worlds in which earlier generations lived, the work they performed, the beliefs they held, the places they inhabited and the choices available to them.

For family-history, archive or research enquiries, Contact Antony.