Welsh Journals

THE POWELLS OF DEVYNOCK AND CHURCH LAWFORD By SIR ANTHONY WAGNER, K.C.V.O. Garter Principal King of Arms THE pedigrees of private families are too often dry bones, lacking the human detail which makes the past live. Where, therefore, letters, diaries or the like survive to breathe life into the skeleton, it seems worth while to put their content on record-and in some ways even more so if the family is of no special distinction, since for great families such evidence is relatively ample. The line which here concerns us left its native Wales more than two centuries ago, but has never forgotten its origin and has continued to produce a distinctively Welsh facial type. In James Powell (1849-1925), believed to be the seventh of that name in lineal succession, this physiog- nomy was marked and can still be seen in his descendants. The existence of the family records on which this note is based may testify to the survival in its descendants of the old Welsh pride of ancestry and fondness for genealogy. My especial debts here are to my great-great-great-aunt Letitia Powell (1 780-1 865), whose notes I shall quote freely, and to my cousin Miss Dorothy Letitia Powell, sometime of the Surrey County Record Office, who has placed her family notes at my disposal. James, the son of James Powell of Devynock, then aged 17, was matriculated in Oxford University as of Jesus College on the 2nd of November 1725. His granddaughter (Letitia Powell, 1819-1863) in her family notes provides a clue to his ancestry. She writes that he was 'a native of South Wales-I believe of the County of Brecknock. The Williams, his relations, lived in this County at Abercamlis, near Brecon. Mr. Philip Williams who became his son-in-law, came from thence. My grandfather was most probably an only child,1 as I never heard of his having had either brothers or sisters, but my father, the Rev. James Powell the younger (1748-1802), when a young man, went into Wales to visit the Williams and became acquainted with some relations of the name of Powell who cultivated their own estate and lived not far from Brecon'. The pedigree of Williams of Abercamlais in Theophilus Jones, A History of the County of Brecknock, Vol. II, 1809, p. 699, shews the marriage of Sarah, daughter of Thomas Williams (d. 1700) to James Powel of 1 In fact he mentions in his will of 1776 a sister Sarah.