Initiative

I guess that this is the third attempt that I've made to chronicle some of my family history research and make it available to the rest of my family and whoever else may be interested. I have vacillated between building a website or writing a pdf document and having made some progress with each of them but not really getting either finished, it occurred to me that a blog might be a better idea. Combining shorter and hopefully regular blogs and photographs will, I hope, be a more efficient way of documenting what I know.


I began researching my maternal family tree in October 2004 at the request of my uncle who was 80 and terminally ill. He asked me if I could discover where his grandparents were buried. I did find out and this encouraged me to go further back. It was he who provided the initial impetus for researching my family history and I dedicate this blog to his memory.


I discovered that it is not unusual to find that my mother's generation knew very little about their ancestors. Although I did ask my mother about her grandparents she knew very little about them or where they were from although a few hints that she gave me did prove helpful. She was born in 1915 and could remember her maternal grandmother but knew little about her.


I have to acknowledge that I had some amazingly good help as I set out to discover more. A second cousin who I became acquainted with at my uncle's funeral was a great source of information and she was kind enough to pass on a great deal of her knowledge and expertise to me. She also introduced me to a (very) distant relative whose knowledge of the area and its past was extensive and who has published his own invaluable and detailed guides to the memorials of the main graveyards in the parishes in which I was interested. I had the pleasure of corresponding with him over the period of a few years (we still keep in touch) and also collaborating with him on the collation of a set of parish records. He also was generous enough to pass on much information from his own extensive research. So all in all I have been extremely fortunate to have such input.


In addition I did a lot of personal research at the Powys and Carmarthenshire Record Offices and through the relevant registry offices. The censuses from 1841 on also proved an invaluable source of information. I will try to give details of sources as I go along. I will also list some of the books and articles that I have read and also provide links to some online material which I found to be of interest.

I called the blog The Pantyffordd Prices because it was here that most of my maternal grandmother's siblings grew up although she herself was not born there. The farm still remains in the Price family having been farmed by my grandmother's younger brother, Evan Tom Price.

Initial blogs will give some further background and will I hope set the scene both historically and geographically for the family history that follows.