Why Bother?

I suppose that interest in the history of your family is an age related thing. I certainly had no interest in it when I was younger. But there's something else too. As I grow older and the modern world grows further and further away from the ethos and environment of my youth, I find myself recalling those days more clearly than I thought possible. That was particularly true when I first found myself retired because when one is engaged in a full time job there isn’t that much time for reflection. 

In a very small measure I can relate to what it was like to live in rural Wales in the past because I experienced a little of it when I was young - something that is very hard to convey to my children today. But even my experience of that lost world pales into insignificance compared with that of others of my generation and that of my parents - and to enter the world of rural Wales in the 18^th and 19^th centuries is almost beyond imagination for me but it is growing even further beyond the imagination of my children.

My maternal grandmother Anne Jones (nee Price)who had been widowed in 1951 (I was 5) lived in a small house in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. Brynhyfryd had no running water, no electricity, and no flush toilet - not a shop for miles. Just an expanse of wild mountain moorland (Waundwr) exposed to the worse of the weather. The name of the house was most appropriate during the summer months (Brynhyfryd means fair or pleasant hill) but it was a complete misnomer when the wind whistled and howled and bent the pine trees that partially surrounded the house and the rain came in sheets from the West. Winter snow meant that the house was almost inevitably marooned with deep drifts filling the lane that led up to the house past the Brychgoed Chapel. I stayed at Brynhyfryd many times during my school summer holidays and visited my grandmother often and for me this was a different but fascinating world! Visiting her meant a bus trip on the South Wales Transport Brecon to Swansea double-decker, getting off at the "holly bush" stop near Beilygwern on the road between Defynock and Cray and then a walk of a about a mile and a half in total, mostly uphill through the fields above Coedhowell farm.

 But even my grandmother’s life was comparatively 'modern' compared to that of her parents. Certainly later in life she was able to travel further than many of them had been able to. Trains and buses and much later cars formed a part of her experience. I can be pretty certain that her mother had never ridden in a car!

Then again, I can relate in a small way to older farming methods - horsepower and haymaking and harvesting by hand I can personally recall. My father and mother both had first-hand experience of farming, my father being a farm worker from the age of 14 for some 20 years and my mother being in service mainly on farms from the same age until the start of the Second World War. My father recalled the days when as young man he had stood with many others at the top of Ship St. in the town of Brecon at one of the two annual "hiring" fairs held in May and November and wait in line for a farmer to hire his labour for the following six months. The contract would be sealed by the farmer handing over a shilling. My uncles and aunts on both sides of the family had similar experiences during their younger days. But even so, apart from my mother's recollections of the rigours of her schooldays, I can scarcely imagine what rural life was like in the nineteenth century and even less so in the 18th!

However, tracing the family back through the generations has had its rewards and although some generations are comparatively faceless - just names in censuses or parish records, yet there is the odd surprise when out of the shadowy past emerges a character whose life is brought to life through other records and information.