Recently a new postcard of South Stack was listed. Most views of this lighthouse are taken from the same spot, showing the island and lighthouse buildings side-on from the south-east. But this one was taken from the sea off the west end of the island, looking up at the tower with the cliffs and the 400 step descent in the distance.

Looking at the reverse, it was postmarked 24 October 1904 in Forest Gate, London. What really caught my eye was that it was addressed to “Miss Gwennie Young, South Stack Lighthouse, Holyhead, Anglesey”! The very intriguing message began “This is how I saw you 12 months ago”. The sender apologised for taking so long to send it, but he had lost the negatives. It sounds like the sender was also the photographer and this was a custom-made postcard (a Real Photo Postcard, RPPC) rather than a mass produced printed one. And to add to the mystery, why was he taking the photo from a boat?

Who were these two people? The first thing I do in cases like this is look at the censuses. The 1901 census was just three years before this card was sent, so was Gwennie Young living at South Stack then? Sure enough, the Principal Keeper at the lighthouse was William Young, and one of his children was Eva Gwendoline Young, aged 9. So when the excited little girl received this personalised card she would have been 12 years old.

The senders of postcards are usually much more difficult to track down. Often they will be signed with just a first name or initials, if signed at all. Fortunately this sender not only gave the surname, but also the home address. The name was J. Sparling, living at 109 Osborne Rd, Forest Gate (which is part of West Ham, East London). Off I go to the 1901 census again, but there was no one by this name at 109 then. Searching for just J. Sparling without the full first name, age or birthplace brought up a lot of possibilities, but there was a James Sparling living in Forest Gate, just a couple of blocks away from 109 Osborne Rd. His occupation? “Lighthouse Engineer”! I think I’ve found the sender.

A scenario now began to form in my mind. Perhaps lighthouse engineer James was visiting South Stack to do some work, was on a boat around the island taking photos and noticed Gwennie waving to him from the lighthouse. When back on land he promised to send her a copy of the photograph. Looking very closely at the photograph, are there two figures standing behind the wall at the base of the lighthouse?

Gwennie Young

Both Gwennie and James had interesting lives that tell stories of life in the lighthouse service. Gwennie was born 28 May 1891 in Pembroke Dock, daughter of lighthouse keeper William Young and his wife Bessie Hoy (whose father was a gunner in the Royal Navy). At the time William was one of three keepers stationed at South Bishop lighthouse, which is perched on a small rocky islet 8 km off of St David’s Head in Pembrokeshire. For offshore lighthouses like this the keepers would spend several weeks on duty, then make the long boat trip back to spend a month or so with their families.

William was born nearby in Solva, Pembrokeshire, son of a blacksmith, but entered the lighthouse service at the age of 20. His brother Thomas, who was 17 years his senior, also became a lighthouse keeper in his mid-20s after a period learning the blacksmithing trade from his father.

William was initially stationed at Plymouth Dock lighthouse, where he met and married Bessie. As was common for lighthouse keepers working for Trinity House (the lighthouse authority for England and Wales), he moved station every few years, working at Start Point, Devon, then South Foreland in Kent. In 1884 he was sent to Basses lighthouse, off the coast of Ceylon (Sri Lanka today), for three years. On return to Britain he then was stationed at Souter Point  in Tyne and Wear, before going to South Bishop just before Gwennie was born. After nine years there he was promoted from Assistant Keeper to Principal Keeper, when he was then placed in charge of South Stack lighthouse for eight years. He finished his career at Strumble Head in Pembrokeshire before retiring, first to a cottage near St Ann’s Head lighthouse overlooking the entrance to Milford Haven, then back to Pembroke Dock.

During William’s tenure at South Stack the lamp in the lighthouse was greatly improved. In 1906 the previous wick-based paraffin lamp was replaced by an incandescent burner, where vapourised paraffin was fed to a glowing mantle, which sat in the middle of a rotating lens that produced the flashes of the lighthouse. Newspaper articles from the time note that little Gwennie had the honour of flicking the switch that set the lens into motion.

By 1911 the family had moved back to Pembrokeshire and it was there in 1916 that Gwennie married Thomas Howard Woodruff. He was the son of a lighthouse keeper and was born at Trwyn Du lighthouse on Anglesey. He had joined the Royal Navy in 1909 and spent most of his career as a railway clerk in various dockyards, mainly Pembroke. They had two children born there, and Gwennie’s parents also lived with them.

Thomas retired from the Royal Navy in 1930, but continued working as a dockyards clerk. In 1939 he was based at Gillingham, Kent, while Gwennie was living in Holyhead, Anglesey. Her eldest brother William Hoy Lile Young was also living in Holyhead, working as a clerk for the Trinity House lighthouse depot at the port, after having been a lighthouse keeper for a few years. Her sister Eleanor had married a man who also worked at the Holyhead lighthouse depot, but they had retired to Bognor Regis by this time. The family had lots of connections to lighthouses.

It’s not known where they lived in the years after the 1939 records, but Thomas died in 1954 in Newton, Lancashire and Gwennie in 1976 in Bath.

James Sparling

So, who was the postcard sender? James Sparling was born in Stirling, Scotland in 1850, the son of soldier Joseph Sparling and Helen McGregor. His father, who was in the 33rd (The Duke of Wellington’s) Regiment of Foot, fought in the Crimean war a few years later. He was then deployed to India, where two more sons were born. Joseph died there in 1860 and his wife remarried. They had moved back to England by 1864.

In his early 20s James was working as an engine fitter in the Limehouse area of the bustling London docklands. In 1875 he married Emily Creamer, daughter of a gardener from Charlwood, Surrey. They soon moved to Penzance, Cornwall, where their first son James was born. He had started working for Trinity House and was an engineer on one of their steamship tenders, which serviced their lighthouses.

By 1881 the family had moved to South Foreland, near Dover, Kent, where there are two lighthouses. Working alongside the seven lighthouse keepers, his occupation was listed in the census as “Engineer in charge of electric lighthouse”. South Foreland was the site of the first electric lamp in a lighthouse when it was installed by the electrical pioneer Michael Faraday in 1858. It was the location of experiments by Trinity House in improving electrical lamps for many years, and Sparling was taking up the mantle in developing these improvements. This may have followed on from his previous job in Cornwall. Lizard Point lighthouse near Penzance had its first electrical light installed in 1878, when Sparling was living there. Was he involved?

During Sparling’s time at South Forelands a remarkable addition was made to the landscape. Joining the two existing lighthouses were three more lighthouse lanterns mounted on wooden platforms. Marked A, B and C in large letters, these towers were used in experiments comparing different types of lamps. Each tower would have a different lamp, and their brightness could be compared from a set distance.

He also became an expert promoting the work of Trinity House. In 1904 he was invited to speak to the Institute of Marine Engineers about the corporation and the construction and operation of their lighthouses, including his work on electrification. It was illustrated with images of the various lighthouses, projected by a magic lantern and probably created using the same camera he used for the photograph sent to Gwennie.

After nine years at South Forelands, Sparling moved on. He left with the esteem of the local community, being presented with a marble and gold clock. Moving back to London, he settled in Forest Gate and became a foreman and superintendent of Trinity House’s engineering works. He worked there over the next two decades before retiring to Bournemouth, where he died in 1927.

During his time in charge of engineering works for Trinity House Sparling probably travelled around many lighthouses to plan equipment upgrades and inspect the systems. He is said to have gone back to South Foreland in 1898 where he was present when the inventor Guglielmo Marconi made the first ever ship-to-shore radio transmission, sending Christmas greetings from the lighthouse to the crew of the East Goodwin lightship, 12 miles distant. And he clearly was at South Stack in 1903, when he took the postcard photograph.

On these tours he would have met up with old friends. The principal keeper of South Stack, Gwennie’s father William Young, had been at South Foreland for four years at the same time that Sparling was there, so they knew each other well. And he clearly made a friend with his daughter. Did she treasure this photograph? How did it make its way to a postcard collector/seller in Manchester, from whom I bought it? That is still unknown, but the mystery of the sender and receiver and how their paths crossed has been solved, shedding new light on life in the lighthouse service.

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Click here to read my “Letter From…” article on Nation Cymru.

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Click here to read my “Letter From…” article on Nation Cymru.

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I’m on my way to the National Library of Wales. Perched on the hill overlooking the town, the Library is the iconic centre of learning and culture in Wales. As a Legal Deposit library it is one of the repositories for all the books published in the UK as well as a wealth of papers, documents, art, sound files, and much more. Accompanied by my wife, who is going there to continue her research into the pioneering freshwater ecologist Kathleen Carpenter, I am planning to find out more about Anglesey mills.

Of particular interest is a file of information about Anglesey windmills from the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales (CPRW). Founded in 1928 by architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis (of Portmeirion fame) under the title of The Council for the Preservation of Rural Wales, its purpose is to secure the protection and enhancement of the country’s landscapes and environment. This file contains information from 1929-1938, around the time when the last of the windmills on the island stopped working and most had started to deteriorate.

On receiving the relatively slim file from the very helpful library staff, I eagerly open it, not knowing exactly what it might contain. First is a list of the windmills on Anglesey, with brief notes of the condition of some. It is undated and unattributed, but given it says Stanley Mill at Trearddur was still working (it closed in 1938), and the condition of some of the other mills, it probably dates from the early to mid-1930s. Accompanying this is a typed manuscript entitled “Article on Anglesey Windmills”, along with the published version of it from the 4 August 1930 edition of the weekly journal The Miller. The author was Rex Wailes, an engineer and historian who developed a keen interest in windmills. As the technical adviser to the Windmill Section of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) he travelled England recording details of windmills, many of which were deteriorating and in danger of being demolished. He wrote two books about English windmills and was active in trying to save them. He had visited Anglesey in 1929, resulting in this manuscript describing the general form and function of the Anglesey style of windmills (which differed from those found in most of England).

Most interesting, however, is a series of letters from January 1930 to March 1931. These were between the antiquarian J.D.K. Lloyd, the then secretary of CPRW, and representatives of various other organizations. These letters outline the early attempts to preserve the increasingly disused and threatened windmills of Wales (the majority of which are on Anglesey).

The first letter, dated 16 Jan 1930, is from Lord Boston, a major landowner on Anglesey, keen archaeologist and President of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society, with a draft resolution on preserving windmills in Wales: “That the attention of the Ancient Monuments Board for Wales [AMBW] be called to the gradual disappearance of the Windmills which are so striking a feature of the landscape in various parts of Wales. That the C.P.R.W expressed the hope that the Board may see fit to take such action as may be in its power to preserve, where possible, these interesting relics of a past phase in the organization of the agricultural and rural life of Wales.”

The resolution was passed by the CPRW board and Lloyd then sent it to AMBW for their consideration. Ralegh Radford of AMBW responded on 16 April saying that more details of the windmills and evidence of their threatened nature was required. Lloyd then decided to marshal the help of other like-minded organizations, writing to A.R. Powys of SPAB and Wilfrid Hemp of the Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments in Wales and Monmouthshire (RCAMWM) with the resolution and AMBW’s response.

Hemp replied a couple of days later, saying that Rex Wailes would be the best person to provide information about the mills, as he had recently visited them. However, Hemp warns that he should contact Wailes soon, as he had just married and was about to embark on his honeymoon in Spain, where he would also be hunting windmills! Hemp also notes that he had just visited Melin y Bont, the unusual mill on Anglesey powered by both wind and water, with Cyril Fox, director of the National Museum of Wales.

Three days later Fox copied Lloyd into a letter he was sending to the Office of Works, with his notes about Melin y Bont, expressing his hope that this unique windmill could be scheduled as a protected building. Around this time Lloyd also wrote to Wailes asking for assistance in providing details of the mills.

On 6 May Radford from AMBW wrote to Lloyd of CPRW asking to meet in person to discuss the windmills. Despite both organisations being involved in Welsh matters, they were actually based in Central London at this time, as was RCAMWM and SPAB. They did meet two days later and, according to a report from Lloyd to Lord Boston, Radford thought that AMBW would be willing to schedule some of the windmills. However, they wouldn’t be able to provide any money to do repairs or compensate the occupiers of working mills if scheduling their mills forced them to rely on old-fashioned methods of milling rather than upgrading machinery and techniques. They agreed that a list of the most important windmills should be drawn up to focus on for scheduling.

Later that month Lloyd received a letter from the secretary of the Windmill section of SPAB, Miss M.I. Batten, who had just published the first volume of her two-volume work English Windmills. She said that she had so far only focused on English windmills, but only knew of two ‘Welsh’ windmills, “Pontrewynydd near Monmouth (a pumping mill) and Mortimers Cross, Kingsland, Herefordshire”. In a follow-up letter two days later she admitted “I am afraid I must have been possessed of the Devil when I wrote to you on May 26th. I know perfectly well that both Monmouth and Hereford are in England, and also that Anglesey is in Wales!” She then points out that they have information on the Anglesey mills from Rex Wailes. Lloyd responded “Monmouth, of course, should – and for some purposes I believe is – connected with Wales, but it is not always politic to suggest this to the inhabitants.”

Batten also informed Lloyd that the address he had used to write to Wailes was wrong, explaining the lack of response, so he wrote again to the correct address. Wailes responded in July, sending the copy of his manuscript for The Miller that was in the folder with these letters, as well as offering his full support for the campaign to list some of the mills. However, by this time Lloyd had learned that AMBW did not hold much hope of being able to schedule any of the windmills. Lloyd and Wailes did agree that they should still press on with trying the get at least Melin y Bont scheduled somehow.

Correspondence about the windmills went quiet for several months after this, until January 1931, when the new secretary of the Windmills section of SPAB, Miss A.M.B. Lloyd, wrote to J.D.K. Lloyd of CPRW, saying she had heard that CPRW might be able to fund repairing one of the Anglesey windmills. He had to advise her that in fact CPRW was unable, both by constitution and funding, of providing any money. Further correspondence between Lloyd, Hemp and Wailes cast doubt that anything can be done about preserving the mills.

However, Wailes throws a cat amongst the pigeons by saying that Hemp had told him there was a possibility that the machinery at Melin y Bont could be “dismantled, and parts taken to the Cardiff Museum”. This provoked a flurry of letters and phone calls to assess the situation and decide how to act. Lloyd forwarded Wailes’ letter to Fox at the National Museum of Wales, asking if he could provide any more information.

Fox seems to have been very particular about the name of his museum, as he responds back – “Who is Mr. Rex Wailes? Will you kindly inform him that the museum to which he refers is the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, and not the Cardiff Museum!!” He goes on to say that it was the first he had heard of the matter, that he would be pleased to receive parts of the mill into their collection but would rather that it wasn’t dismantled. Lloyd writes back to Wailes about Fox’s response (diplomatically leaving out Fox’s response about the name, but prominently giving the full, correct name of the museum). Wailes responds saying that SPAB have no funding to save Melin y Bont, but could help publicise the issue.

After this the correspondence ends. The machinery in Melin y Bont wasn’t dismantled and sent to Cardiff after all. It continued grinding grain, powered solely by the water wheel, until around 1941, and was sadly burnt out by a fire in 1973, leaving the machinery in a heap at the bottom of the tower.

Efforts to schedule and protect the Anglesey windmills gathered pace again in the early 1950s. A list of windmills and watermills on Anglesey produced by SPAB at this time has most of the windmills described as “almost in ruins”, “very poor state of repair”, “half demolished”, etc. Even Melin Llynon, which is now proudly restored and fully working again, was described as “in a poor state of repair its windows and doors being almost non-existent”. However, from 1952 and through the next two decades, most of the surviving windmills were listed. Ironically, Melin y Bont was overlooked during this period of listings, but it was finally protected in 1998. As can be seen in my gallery of Anglesey windmills, many of the windmills of Anglesey have now been converted to dwellings or the empty towers stabilised. It took a while, but the wonderful windmills of Anglesey were finally saved.

The post Saving Anglesey’s Windmills appeared first on Anglesey History.

The following review was published in the Anglesey Antiquarian Society‘s 2020 Transactions. Oriel Môn will be reopening on 18 May 2021, and the exhibition can be viewed until 13 June 2021.

Jane Kenney, Gwynedd Archaeological Trust, an exhibition at Oriel Môn, Llangefni, 12 December 2020 – 13 June 2021

Between 2006 and 2010 Gwynedd Archaeological Trust (GAT) carried out extensive excavations at Parc Cybi, Holyhead, in advance of development of a business park. As such a large site was being developed, GAT was able to investigate more than 20 hectares. Peeling off the layers across such a large area has revealed an astonishing collection of archaeological finds ranging from the Mesolithic to the 18^th century. The results of the excavations were presented at a day-long symposium in February 2020 at the Ucheldre Centre in Holyhead, which was accompanied by an exhibition about the finds. This exhibition has now moved to Oriel Môn, where it can be viewed until 13 June 2021 (COVID-19 restrictions allowing).

Given the wide range of periods uncovered by the excavation, the advance of time is the keystone of this exhibition. As you walk into the central display space of the museum, footprints on the floor guide you to the left to start your journey, and a timeline running around the top of the walls gives key dates ranging from the last ice age to the start of the industrial revolution. Twelve nicely designed and well-illustrated bilingual display boards line the walls above four low display cabinets with artefacts, supplemented by a fifth tall cabinet containing pottery and stone items and an open central area with more stone objects.

The displays start by showing scenes of the excavation under way, along with some of the flint, chert and stone tools found on the site. It moves on to a display of one of the highlights of the excavation, a rare 6000-year-old timber hall. An illustration showing a bucolic domestic scene outside the hall accompanies photographs of the excavated evidence of other domestic buildings, including roundhouses, a Bronze Age granary, and a hearth from a small hut.

The next set of displays show the various burial practices in the area, including the nearby Trefignath burial chamber, Bronze Age cist graves and later Roman long cist cemeteries, and excavations of the Iron Age roundhouse village. These are accompanied by a display case full of stones with holes that were found in the village. Some of these were fishing net weights, but most were spindle whorls that, combined with a stick, were used for spinning fibres into threads for clothing. The display is graced with a recent photo of a Nepalese villager using a similar system for spinning.

Halfway through the exhibition we encounter the tall display case with several stone bowls, mortars and hammer stones, two pieces of pottery and two reconstructed Neolithic pots. In contrast to the rest of the exhibition this case has very little information about the items on display, just a few labels with brief descriptions. The next display case makes up for this by having several pottery fragments from the early, middle and late Neolithic and the Bronze Age, showing how style and decoration developed through time. The accompanying posters describe domestic life and industry during the Iron Age and Romano-British period.

The final display case focuses on the ‘bling’. The centrepiece is a small gold ring found at the edge of a Bronze Age field. It is small, with a gap in it, and may have been a hair decoration. Also in the case is an amber bead, other decorative items made from shale, pottery and cannel coal, and some iron tools. The history of the occupation of the site post-Romans is explored in the last two posters, with photographs showing corn driers, a cobbled floor from a now vanished farmhouse, and a stone-lined well with steps leading down to it.

In the centre of the exhibition area is an open wooden-framed display case, filled with soil and tools of the archaeologist’s trade. This is used to display several large stone objects: a stone bowl, a saddle quern, a post for a granary and a cup-marked rock.

The text of the displays is clear and geared towards informing the general public of the highlights of the finds and their importance in understanding our past. A couple of copies of the summary report (with a chair to ease your feet and a magnifying glass to ease your eyes), alongside a QR code link to the GAT web site, allows the curious visitor to delve further into details of the finds. Full reports of the excavation can be found on GAT’s web site at https://heneb.org.uk/project/archaeology-at-parc-cybi-holyhead/.

Warren Kovach

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My new map is a Bassett and Chiswell edition, so I sat down to have a closer look at it, particularly the coats of arms. There were two, for Christopher Villiers and Arthur Annesley, the Earls of Anglesey. Who?? In my years of studying Anglesey’s history, I’ve never heard of them, and looking through my extensive collection of Anglesey history books I can only find the Earl of Anglesey mentioned in a single sentence.

Well, unlike the Marquesses of Anglesey (the Paget family of Plas Newydd, who were also the Earls of Uxbridge), the Earls of Anglesey seemed to not have any connection to the island whatsoever. It was just a handy title that a king could hang on one of his favoured courtiers.

The title was first bestowed on Christopher Villiers. Born in 1593, he was the son of Sir George Villiers, High Sheriff and MP in Leicestershire. He and his brothers became close to the court of King James VI and I, and Christopher (or Kit as he was known in court) became Gentleman of the Bedchamber and later Master of the Robes to the King. The king granted him the titles of Earl of Anglesey and Baron Villiers of Daventry in 1623. When he died in 1630 the title passed to his only son Charles, but he died childless in 1661. The title then became extinct.

However, the title was resurrected just two months later for another family. Arthur Annesley was born in Dublin in 1614, son of Francis Annesley, 1st Viscount Valentia. His father’s family was from Nottinghamshire, but he moved to Ireland at the time of the rise of the Anglo-Irish landowners. After education at Magdalen College, Oxford, and admission to Lincoln’s Inn Arthur became a Parliamentarian, first for Radnorshire then later for Dublin and Carmarthen. He initially sided with the parliamentarians during the English Civil War, but towards the end of the Protectorate his sympathies turned royalist and he was involved in the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. He was rewarded by being made Earl of Anglesey and Baron Annesley of Newport Pagnel, Buckinghamshire in April 1661. He filled many offices of state through his life, including Lord Privy Seal.

After his death in 1686 the title passed to his son James, also a parliamentarian and landowner. He died just four years later, and his eldest son James became Earl. James died in 1701, having just one daughter, so the earldom passed to his younger brother John, who also died without a son in 1710. The youngest brother Arthur then became the 5^th Earl of Anglesey. He was a prominent politician like his grandfather, being a member of the British Parliament for Cambridge University, and of the Irish Parliament for New Ross, near his estates in Co. Wexford. He was also Vice-Treasurer and Paymaster General in Ireland and Governor of County Wexford. He died childless in 1737.

The 6th Earl of Anglesey was Arthur’s cousin Richard Annesley. He is known for his rather murky dealings surrounding claims to titles and legitimacy of marriages; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him a “kidnapper and bigamist”. Before becoming Earl of Anglesey he took the title of 5^th Baron Altham in 1727 after the deaths of the previous barons, his father and elder brother Arthur. However, his brother’s son James, who may or may not have been illegitimate (the identity of his mother was disputed) and who had later become estranged from his father, also had a claim to the title. Richard arranged to have the young teenager James kidnapped and sent off to America as an indentured servant. James managed to escape and make his way back to England 15 years later, where he tried to claim the title. He initially won his case in court, but it was overturned on appeal and Richard continued as the 5^th Baron Altham and, by that time, Earl of Anglesey. This incident is thought to have influenced Robert Louis Stevenson for part of the plot of his novel Kidnapped.

Richard was “married” three times, although the legitimacy of the marriages was disputed. He abandoned the first wife, Ann Proust, and was separated from the second, Ann Simpson, based on his cruelty. It seems he married the second Ann when he was still legally married to the first. His third marriage to Juliana Donovan produced two sons and two daughters.

When Richard died in 1761 his titles, including the title Earl of Anglesey, were to have passed to his son Arthur, but a distant cousin, Constantine Phipps, 1^st Baron Mulgrave, claimed that the marriage between Richard Annesley and Juliana Donovan was not legitimate, and he therefore should take possession of the titles, given he was a grandson of the 3rd Earl. The court ruled that the marriage certificate was forged and declared all the English titles for the family extinct. This was the end of the line for the Earls of Anglesey.

The post Who Were the Earls of Anglesey? appeared first on Anglesey History.

My Anglesey History web site had its beginnings in 1995 as a single page on my main business site for Kovach Computing Services. Five years later I hived it off to a separate web site, Anglesey-History.co.uk, and started expanding it with various new major sections. In 2008 I added a completely new section on the Windmills of Anglesey.

The inspiration for the section was the excellent book Windmills of Anglesey by Barry Guise and George Lees. It was published in 1992 and the first print run sold out quickly. It was highly sought after, not least by me (I made the mistake of not buying it as soon as I saw it!), and prices of second-hand copies on eBay were reaching £100. In 2010 a revised edition was published, which is still in print and available on Amazon and other outlets, such as the Oriel Môn shop.

Over the Christmas 2020 holiday I began revising the windmill section of the web site. This was mainly because many of the links to other websites that I had added in 2008 were no longer functional. The sites had either disappeared or had moved the pages to new addresses. I also started revisiting the actual descriptions of each windmill.

In developing the windmills section of the website I relied heavily on the research that Guise and Lees had published, as well as information from my own research and other sites, such as the millsarchive.org. But in the years since, many new sources of historical information have become more easily accessible over the internet. These include the Wales censuses from 1841-1911 (on Ancestry.co.uk or FamilySearch.org), the Anglesey parish records (again on Ancestry.co.uk or FamilySearch.org), the 1840 Tithe Maps and many archives of scanned and indexed newspapers from around the country (britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and the National Library of Wales). The scrollable version of the early Ordnance Survey maps at the National Library of Scotland is also very useful. I started delving deeper into the history of a couple of the mills and discovered there was much more that I could add, to expand on what Guise and Lees had published, to clarify some points that were uncertain, and to correct some mistakes.

The censuses are particularly useful. These give the names, ages, birthplaces and occupations of every person living on the island. In a land where just a few surnames and given names predominate, these are vital for determining which William Jones, for instance, is being mentioned in other records. The birthplaces of children can also be useful for tracking the career of a miller who may have moved around to work at different places. Milling often ran in families, with sons and brothers found working at various mills around the island. I’ve started building family trees of the millers and their families I’ve encountered in the censuses so far, using genealogical software, to help in making connections between the people found working around the island.

As an example of how these approaches can work, lets look at Mona Mill. Also known as Melin y Borth, it overlooks Amlwch harbour and is the tallest on Anglesey, as well as the only brick-built one. Guise and Lees point out that it was built and owned by the Paynter family, and was run by various members of the Jones family through the decade, first Owen Jones, then Robert Jones, and then William Jones, who they say was probably Robert’s son. However, investigating the censuses for Amlwch has shown that, not only was William not Robert’s son, but there were actually three different unrelated William Jones that ran the mill through the years. The second William, who was running it in 1871, had previously been working at mills in Llechylched and Llandrygarn, and later went to run Melin Adda on the other side of Amlwch.

As this blog is published I have only revised the histories of just a few of the mills (the three mills near Amlwch, Melin Adda, Melin y Borth and Melin y Pant, two in Llandrygarn, Melin Manaw and Melin Newydd and Melin Orsedd in Rhoscefnhir) . But the process is ongoing and I hope to have all the pages updated in the near future.

Warren Kovach is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk.

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Yesterday we were talking about The Royal Charter disaster of 1859. Most of the victims were buried in the churchyards near the wreck site at Moelfre (as described in my blog about the local parish records), but we knew a few had been buried in Pentraeth. After lunch we took a stroll up to the church to explore.

We soon found the graves; six simple anonymous stones, plus a larger one added later to commemorate the victims. A later search of the Pentraeth parish records shows they were buried in mid-November, about two weeks after the wreck.

Close to these graves was another one I’d wanted to find. When asked about famous women of Pentraeth the first to pop into my mind was Mary Owen. Newspaper reports in 1911 trumpeted her as being “King George’s oldest subject” at the age of 108. She lived at Fron-oleu, a small cottage on the slopes of Mynydd Llwydiarth overlooking Traeth Coch. The story goes that two strangers tracked her down and arrived at the cottage with a camera. She was asleep when they first arrived, but they photographed her both asleep and awake. The photos were made into postcards, celebrating her longevity. She died just a few months later, in December 1911, an event that was reported in newspapers ranging from the Dundee Evening Telegraph and the Cheshire Observer to Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper of London.

As usual, I wanted to find out more about her, so I first turned to the censuses. The 1911 census page for Fron-oleu shows it occupied by Mary and her nephew Owen, with two visitors on the day, Mary Owens and John Glyn Owen (a shoemaker). Oddly, Mary is listed in 1911 as being 105, rather than 108. She is also listed as single. I had assumed the John Owen, who is also listed on her gravestone, was her husband, but apparently not. He died in 1898, aged 80, so I checked the 1891 census for Fron-oleu, where they are listed as brother and sister. Nephew Owen was there again, as well as another nephew John.

John and Mary were the inhabitants of Fron-oleu all the way back to 1861, with their occupations variously listed as “farmer”, “labourer”, “housekeeper” or “living on own means”. Owen also lived there as far back as 1871, when the 15-year-old was listed as a “scholar”, presumably going to school at one of the two recently founded schools in Pentraeth. John had lost his wife early, as he was widowed in all these census years. His 10-year-old son John was a schoolboy in the house in 1861.

Step back another 10 years to 1851 and Mary is still living in Fron-oleu, but this time with her parents Richard (a labourer) and Ellen. Going further back to 1841 finds Fron-oleu a very full house, with Richard and Ellen there with sons John, Richard and David, and a daughter Elizabeth. John was the one who later occupied the house with his sister, and Richard is listed as a shoemaker. But where was Mary? She was an adult, the oldest of the family, so must have been living somewhere else. In fact, a Mary Owen of the right age was one of two young women working as servants in Marian, a large and old house between Pentraeth and Talwrn. I suspect this is her. Most other Mary Owens in the area were living with either parents or spouses.

Looking through all these censuses raised some questions about her story of being the oldest subject in 1911. First, the postcard and news reports all state she was born in Trefriw, which is best known as a village in the Conwy valley near Llanrwst, but is also the name of a place in the south of the island in Llangadwaladr. But all the censuses say that she and her brother were born in Pentraeth. Maybe there was a nearby house by that name, but nothing like it shows up in the Pentraeth censuses.

Of more concern is the age. Although she was supposed to be 108 in 1911, the census that year actually shows her as 105 years old, which would make her birth year 1806 rather than the 1803 usually cited. Ten years before, she gave her age as 89, making her birth year 1812. Going back another 10 years to 1891 she reports an age of 65, which would make her birth year 1826!

In the earlier censuses her reported ages stabilize to the usual interval of ten years. So, it looks like Mary was actually born around 1816-1818. Turning my eye to the baptism and marriage records, I found that her parents Richard Owen and Ellen Thomas were married in Pentraeth church on 25 May 1815. Scanning through the baptism records for Pentraeth (which only cover the baptisms at the established church, St. Mary) I can find no children of Richard and Ellen until youngest child in the 1841 census, David, was baptised in 1825. But searching another online database, the Wales Births and Baptisms, 1541-1907 at Familysearch.org, turns up a Mary Owen, daughter of Richard and Ellen, christened on 11 January 1818 in the nearby village of Llanbedrgoch. Some of her siblings also appear in that database, baptised in Pentraeth. Perhaps they were nonconformists and were baptised in chapels rather than the established church.

Mary had her five minutes of fame for being the oldest British subject, but the truth is she died at the respectable, but unremarkable, age of 94. How she became known as the oldest is not recorded, but this goes to show that we can’t always rely on stories like this without looking into the actual records.

The post The Many Ages of Mary Owen appeared first on Anglesey History.

I’ve been an enthusiastic genealogist for many years and use Ancestry regularly. However, as an American transplanted to Anglesey, I don’t actually have any Anglesey ancestors who would appear in these records (although I can claim descent from the Princes of Gwynedd and a connection to the Tudors of Penmynydd). But these can also be a great resource for general historical research. So I decided to have a dig around in the records to see what I could find of interest. What I found were stories of the happiness of birth and marriage, but also of tragedy.

If you are interested in searching these records, but do not have an Ancestry.co.uk subscription, you can access it for free at most libraries.

Who’s Who?

I started by searching for some famous names. First up was the artist Kyffin Williams, who was the subject of the ‘K’ chapter in my new book A-Z of the Isle of Anglesey. He was in the Llangefni register, with his parents the unusually named Henry Inglis Wynne Williams and Essyllt Mary Williams.

His parents were married in Pentraeth in 1915…

… and his grandfather Owen was born in 1829.

Owen’s father James was the rector of Llanfairynghornwy (where Kyffin was buried), and he and his wife Francis were instrumental in establishing the Anglesey Association for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck (a forerunner of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution) after witnessing a fatal shipwreck off the northwest coast of Anglesey.

Kyffin’s great-great uncle Thomas Williams, who was involved in the development of the Parys Mountain copper mine and was one of the richest men in Wales in the late 18th century, can be found in the Llanidan burial records

I branched out to other prominent Anglesey names , starting with the Bulkeleys (the subjects of the ‘B’ chapter of A-Z of the Isle of Anglesey). I found the burials of a trio of Richard Williams-Bulkeleys, the 10th, 11th and 12th Baronets of Baron Hill, Beaumaris.

A distant relative of theirs, William Bulkeley of Brynddu, was baptised in Llanfechell in 1691:

He went on the inherit the Brynddu estate, but more famously kept meticulous diaries that documented life on Anglesey in the 18th century. They can be read online at bulkeleydiaries.bangor.ac.uk.

Of course far more people in these records weren’t the rich or famous. But there are still stories behind their entries. In 1850 a William Jewett married Hannah Hughes. He was a boilermaker working on the construction of the Britannia Bridge (and probably living in the workers’ accommodation on site). His name sounds English rather than local, so I guessed he came here for work and married a local lass.

A quick search through the census records on Ancestry shows that in 1871 a William Jewett and his wife Hannah (she was born in North Wales, he in Manchester) were living in Portsea, Hampshire with their seven children, where he was building ships. The birthplaces of the children show they moved around a lot: Plymouth, Newton Abbott, Southampton. In 1881 they were living in Southcoates, Yorkshire, where he was still building ships.

Other bridge-connected records were of the sons of Henry Fisher, who was the first keeper of the Menai Suspension Bridge after its completion in 1826. They would have been born in the Bridge House at the Gwynedd end of the bridge. Here is Henry Jr’s baptism record:

The Royal Charter

Alongside the happiness of baptisms and marriages, there is also the sadness of the burials. But some of these reflect a much wider tragedy than the individual losses. I specifically went looking for what the records could tell us about the Royal Charter sinking.

On 26 October 1859 the steam clipper Royal Charter, returning from Australia, sank in a storm on the rocks near Moelfre, with the loss of over 400 lives. You can read more about this on my web site.

The closest church, at Llanallgo, bore the brunt of dealing with the dead, so I found the pages from their parish records. I was stunned to see just a single entry for many of the dead, with the actual number repeatedly scratched out and revised:

I was also surprised to see a familiar name further down the page. Isaac Lewis was a Moelfre-born lad who went to sea and was a crewmember on the Royal Charter. He died in the sinking, within sight of his boyhood home. He reportedly cried out ‘Oh, my father, I’ve come home to die.’ A song was written about him; you can hear it through the YouTube link at the bottom of my web page about the wreck.

Although the initial burials were unnamed, over the next couple of months more victims of the wreck were buried after having been identified. The ones in the record below were from Liverpool and Melbourne.

The task of dealing with the dead fell to the rector of Llanallgo, Stephen Roose Hughes. The burden of attempting to identify the victims, organizing the burials, and writing hundreds of letters to the grieving relatives took a terrible toll on him. The next page in the records show that he died two years later at the early age of 47.

Although most of the victims were buried in Llanallgo, bodies were washed up on the shores of neighbouring parishes, as far away as Pentraeth, and they were buried in those local churchyards. Many were interred in the parish of Penthos Lligwy, whose rector was Hugh Robert Hughes, the brother of Stephen Roose Hughes. Many of the burials in his parish were unidentified. But he attempted to add possibly identifying features, such as initials on crucifixes around their necks. One victim was noted to be “apparently an African”.

Overall, this is a fantastic collection that gives lots of insight to the people of Anglesey. I think I’ll be using this resource a lot in my future historical research.

The post Happiness and Tragedy – Exploring Anglesey Parish Records on Ancestry.co.uk appeared first on Anglesey History.

I know there is no place like this in or around my village, and as far as I know never was. The hill in the background doesn’t look like the landscape around here. It could conceivably be Mynydd Llwydiarth, but there are far too many houses on the slope. The National Library of Wales place names database, which lists not only towns, parishes and villages, but also individual farm and field names as shown on the mid-19th century tithe maps, doesn’t show any other Pentraeths in Wales. So where was this? I can’t resist a chance to follow up a historical mystery, so I bid for the postcard and won it for the princely sum of £1.

The first clues are on the back of the postcard. It was published by F. H. May, based on Ata Road in Pwllheli. It was postmarked somewhere in Caernarfonshire (part of the postmark is missing) in 1914 and was sent to a Mr Williams of 15 Hill Street, Gerlan, Bethesda. So it is probably somewhere in North Wales. The writer of the card, who signs off as “Nain”, says “This is my house O Alun how do you like it? Be good you shall come here for your holidays.”

I posted scans of the postcard on my Facebook and Twitter pages, hoping one of my followers might recognize it. Within a couple of hours the mystery of the location had been solved. On Twitter a couple of followers said “Nefyn”, and @dilgriff posted another postcard from F. H. May with a view across the bay at Nefyn, showing this building sitting on top of the cliff. This card seems to come from a page on the Nefyn.com website about the photographer, Fred May. One Facebook follower, Wendy Howard, jumped in with both feet and started researching the recipient family; see her comments on my original post.

So we now know where the mysterious Pentraeth Castle is, lets fill out some of the details about it and the people involved. First, when was it built? The old-maps.co.uk site allows you to explore old Ordnance Survey maps through the years, from the 1st edition in the late 1880s. The one from 1900 shows The Castle on top of the cliff overlooking the bay. In 1889 there was just a small building on this site, labelled “Cliff Cottage”. By 1918 the building was labelled “Castell Pentraeth”.

The census can also provide clues. In 1891 Cliff Cottage was still in existence. It was occupied by Griffith Griffiths, his wife Ellen and their 10 year old niece Jane Evans. Griffith was a settmaker, presumably working at the nearby Gwylwyr Quarry, which produced granite setts for paving roads. So that cottage must have been demolished and the castle built sometime between 1891 and 1900.

Cliff Castle appears in the 1901 census, occupied solely by Ellen Owens. She is listed as a servant and caretaker. In 1911 she is still there as its caretaker, the only occupant. Was this ostentatious castellated building a holiday home for some wealthy person, with Ellen looking after it when the owner was not in residence?

Most UK censuses only list the people who were actually living at a property on the day. But in 1911 they also produced summary books, which for each property gave just the name of the main occupier, along with the total number of males and females living there on census day. For The Castle the occupier is named as Corton Lord, with just a single female (Ellen) actually living there. He presumably is the owner and occasional resident.

So who was Corton Lord? An unusual name like that should be easy to track down, but searching the Ancestry and FamilySearch genealogy databases throws up very little. Beside the entry for the 1911 census, all Ancestry offers that seems to fit is a Frederick Corton Lord, born in 1860 in Salford, Lancashire, who is listed in one person’s family tree as the husband of Katherine Pollitt, with no further information. Searches of the newspaper databases at the National Library of Wales (available online free of charge to any resident of Wales who applies for a reader’s ticket) were also fruitless. The next step after these online resources would be to visit the Gwynedd Archives, but for the moment I’ll need to leave this question aside.

What about the postcard writer and recipient? My Facebook follower Wendy got to this before me and tracked down the 1911 census record for the family living at 15 Hill Street, Bethesda. They were William T Williams, a quarryman at Penrhyn Quarry, his wife Annie and their three children. One was six year old Owen Alun Williams, so this little boy was the “O Alun” to whom this postcard was sent from his Nain (grandmother). He would have been around nine years old when the postcard was sent and she is encouraging him to be good so that he can come visit. It sounds like his parents may have been ill, but are improving.

So was the caretaker of Pentraeth Castle, Ellen Owens, little Alun’s grandmother? Given that she is listed as single in both censuses, that doesn’t seem likely. She was 70 in 1911, so perhaps someone else had taken over as caretaker by 1914, when the card was posted. A concerted effort to track down the Williams family tree would probably help to identify her, but other tasks are calling me now, so I’ll need to set this aside for another time.

The post The Mystery of the Non-Existent Castle appeared first on Anglesey History.