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AN APPROACH TO WELSH GENEALOGY By Major FRANCIS JONES, T.D. Address delivered at a meeting of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion in London on Wednesday, 10th December, 1948, Professor J. GORONWY EDWARDS, F.B.A., M.A., d.litt., in the Chair. I. INTRODUCTORY. DURING the latter half of the eighteenth century English tourists "discovered" Wales. Nearly all the visitors were people in easy circumstances and alumni of our older universities. It became the fashion to write a book on the Tour in Wales giving topographical details, the customs, dress, habits of the "natives," descriptions of ruined castles, pleasant manor houses, and picturesque cottages. These works are of the greatest importance to the student of social and economic conditions of bygone Wales, and they throw consider- able light on the state of its agricultural population before the industrial revolution had affected the traditional life of the country.- The impressions formed by these tourists varied a great deal. Some were the precursors of Caradoc Evans, and belaboured the "natives" in no uncertain manner, representing them as a primitive and, indeed, often as a sub-human survival. This led to the forma- tion in England in the early nineteenth century of a "Society for diffusing Useful Knowledge amongst the Welsh." Others were forerunners of A. G. Bradley, who found in the remote towns and vales of Gwalia a homely and dignified people. Whatever the nature of their conclusions, nearly all the visitors noticed one especial characteristic which seems to have been the hall-mark of a Welshman of those days, namely an inordinate love of genealogy and heraldry which permeated all classes. This national and family pride was noticed by Warner in 1797, and he wrote that the Welsh "seem to have it by hereditary descent from their Celtic forefathers, who thought more highly of themselves, than the polished nations around them conceived they had a right to do." The Reverend John Evans, who lived in one of the polished nation's most polished cities, Bath, wrote in 1804 that the phrase "As long as a Welsh pedigree" was an old proverb. He added, "A Welsh gentleman will climb up by a ladder of his pedigree into princely extraction and that it may be said, Men are made heralds in other countries, but born so in Wales." The worthy cleric went into the statistics of Cambrian genealogy and ascertained that up to 1804, the number of Welsh pedigrees registered in the College of Arms came to the startling total of 7,773. This characteristic had not suddenly come into being and there are evidences of its existence in the early Middle Ages. In this essay an attempt will be made to discuss Welsh genealogical origins