A painting of my grandmother’s cottage
If you would have asked me a month ago about my ancestry, I would have said, with great certainty, almost entirely Welsh. Both sides of my family, as far as I have traced on my family tree, are Welsh going back generations. In fact, my father’s family lived in the same quarryman’s cottage for over a century. My grandmother lived in the cottage her whole life, as did my great grandmother before her, and my great great grandmother, who was the first to live there with her family, died in the cottage in the mid-19th century. My grandfather, who lived in the cottage with my grandmother after their marriage, came from a line of Welsh quarrymen, and all those quarrymen, and their wives, came from the same community.
My mother’s family moved around more than my father’s, and their occupations were more diverse, ranging from sailors to carters, but they too were predominantly Welsh. All my maternal grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents were born in North Wales, all but one who was born in Liverpool. I am the first generation on my father’s side to speak English as a first language, and only the second on my mother’s. Just why my mother and her siblings were raised speaking English is unknown, but they were born in WW2, or shortly before, and to help make ends meet, and to help the war effort, my grandmother took in lodgers and refugees from England, possibly changing the household language to English. When asked why she speaks English to her children, my grandmother would say, with a twinkle in her eye, “They speak English to me!”
Although I have been working on my family tree for years, I have never purchased a commercial DNA test. Some people swear that they are accurate, others have great doubts about the accuracy, and I was simply never curious enough to take one. My mother, however, purchased one, as did several cousins, and her result, while interesting, was not surprising: 97% Welsh, 2% Irish, 1% Dutch. Now, with recent changes made by the ancestry platform to ancestral regions, her results have been updated to 96% North Wales/North West England and 4% South Wales. No Irish and no Dutch. But is this second classification really more accurate than the first? My maternal great grandmother was Roman Catholic and my grandfather always said that one of his sailor forefathers met a woman on a voyage and brought her back to Wales. Sadly, no one in the family now remembers where she was from. Some say Spain, some say Ireland, some say Scotland.
My sister recently decided to join those family members who have taken a DNA test and purchased a kit. As my father’s family are even more rooted in North Wales than my mother’s, we had no reason to expect anything other than a similar result: 96%+ North Wales/North West England (as the region is now classed). The result, however, when it came, was a total surprise. My sister, according to the result, is 9-15% Cornish! Further, this is on the paternal side, suggesting a Cornish great grandparent. The rest of her DNA makeup, according to the result, is between 70-82% North Wales/North West England and between 9-15% South Wales.
Given a lot of men left Cornwall with their families in the 19th century to work in the mines and quarries of Wales, it is entirely possible that I have Cornish ancestry. Yet, all my paternal great grandparents were Welsh, and all my great great grandparents were seemingly Welsh too. So far, none of my close paternal cousins that have taken a DNA test show any Cornish, and those distant DNA matches that do, have very little Welsh so the Cornish in them could have come from an unrelated ancestor.
It is therefore quite a mystery where my sister’s supposed Cornish DNA comes from and all kinds of theories are currently circulating in the family: one of our great grandparents was adopted, one of them was unfaithful, one of their families was concealing an ‘English’ heritage. Of course, it is also possible that my sister has throwback genes to a distant ancestor, due to the random nature of DNA inheritance, and it is also possible that my father’s family is so rooted in North Wales that ‘old Welsh Celtic’ genes are being misidentified as ‘Cornish’, although Cornish genetic markers are said to be more similar to English markers than to Welsh.
As the historian in the family, I am being called on to solve this mystery. In all honesty, I am not sure I will be able to do so. Aside from the Welsh custom of patronymics, which involved taking a father’s Christian name as a surname, a practise still going on in some families, including some branches of mine, into the19th century, there were hundreds of people with names like Jane Thomas, Richard Hughes, William Owen, Ann Williams and Margaret Jones. It is therefore extremely difficult to trace back Welsh ancestors beyond the census. The furthest I have got in years is to the late 1700s and I am not sure I will ever fulfil my dream of discovering what my ancestors were doing in Tudor times.Thomas and Williams are also very common Cornish surnames so unless I can trace back a family to Cornwall it will be impossible to know if they are of Welsh or Cornish origin.
There is, however, one middle name amongst my paternal great grandfathers that is most unusual for a Welsh boy. His brother had this middle name too. This name is Temple. Although the surname is not particularly Cornish, and my cousin descended from him has no Cornish in his DNA, according to Google AI: ‘Temple can originate as a habitational name from the small village of Temple in Cornwall, England. The village was named after the Knights Templar, a medieval military order that held a large estate there in the 12th century.’ Could this be the answer to our Cornish mystery? Was my great grandfather given this name in honour of a Cornish ancestor?
In an attempt to solve this mystery, my father and I are now going to take DNA tests. Will ‘Cornish’ show up in us too? Or will my sister’s result be unique? In the meantime, I am going to do more research on my family tree, particularly on my great grandfather and on a great grandmother whose upward branches are rather bare!