The Davies Caeadda Family
A Welsh Farming Dynasty, 1700–1966
The early family-history study from which much of my later work on rural Wales developed.
This volume reconstructs generations of the Davies family associated with Caeadda and neighbouring farms, preserving names, relationships and documentary evidence relating to a long-established upland farming family.
Why I wrote this book
This was one of the books in which my long-running family research first became a durable published record. I wanted to preserve the history of ancestors who had lived and farmed at Caeadda across generations and to ensure that evidence scattered through official records and family memory was brought together while it could still be reconstructed.
At this stage my principal question was genealogical: who were these people, how were they related, where did they live, and how did the family continue across the upland landscape? The value of the project lay in recovery and preservation before broader interpretation.
Where the research began
The research has roots in family-history work begun in the late 1990s. Caeadda became one of the central places in that investigation because the family’s association with the farm and surrounding district offered an unusually long thread through which generations could be followed.
Sources and method
The book is built from census returns, civil registration, parish and chapel records, family evidence, photographs, wills and genealogical comparison. It belongs deliberately to the documentary phase of my work: assembling evidence carefully enough that later researchers, including myself, could return to it with new questions.
How it fits into my wider work
I now regard The Davies Caeadda Family as a foundational book. The material preserved here fed directly into Old Llyfnant Valley Farming Families and, much later, Voices from the Uplands. The later book asks broader questions about farming, faith, migration, kinship and cultural change; this earlier volume supplied much of the documentary ground on which that interpretation rests.
Publication details
- Author: Antony David Davies
- Published: 2014
- Formats: Kindle and paperback
See also Voices from the Uplands and Family History & Genealogy.