Touring Britain

A tour guide is most helpful when you are visiting a new country, especially if only in your imagination.  In my JONES surname tree climbing it was necessary to make this trip on many, many, many, occasions.   "A unique combination of Atlas, illustrated Guidebook, and Gazetteer..." it states on the cover.  A guide to the familiar, the offbeat, and the not-so-well known the cover goes on to state.  My kind of book.  Over the years, it has proved to be such a guide.

Reader's Digest was a standard in my house growing up.  It was placed on bathroom floor next to that thing you sat on for a while to help get things moving.  When I saw this guide book by Reader's Digest, I already had room for it in my mind.   Beautiful pictures and excellent writing were mine as I took my turns touring throughout Britain.  Published 1992, it contained detailed maps of the big island which I have used again and again to study locations and geographic areas.  A delight to my sore eyes after a long day at the office. [Was Family Physician for some 27 years!]  A wonderful reading, reference, and resource to have on your shelf.

Welsh Place - Names

Unusual and strange names were these that presented themselves to my thought processes.  What in the world!...was often my response.  Who ever heard of Ifftwn or Kilgwrrwg?  This Welsh tree climbing was getting more difficult by the discovery.  Where were these places anyway?

Names and places found in Welsh genealogy can be difficult to understand and/or to find their location.  The following text has served me on many occasions to help discover if such a place name really exist.

"A Gazetteer of Welsh Place - Names" it is called. [ A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary.]  First published in 1957, it represents a revised work for the Ordnance Survey map system for Welsh place-names.  In the introduction it states that the primary purpose was to serve as a guide to the orthography of Welsh place-names. [An orthography is the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage or the representation of the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols.]  You can imagine the difficulty I had with the Welsh "proper letters" and the sounds of the Welsh language passing through my Kentucky born and Bluegrass raised brain.

At any rate, this text provided me a way to look-up a name and find where it was geographically located in Wales.  What a help it was on those dark and stormy nights in my genealogical tree house.

The text was last published Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1967.  Edited by Elwyn Davies.

Guide Books

A guide is to help direct you in a course or show you the way to be followed.  It implies an ability to help keep you on that course, and provide you intimate knowledge along the way.  You can certainly appreciate what a budding family tree climber (genealogist) with a surname JONES was trying to figure out.  The following is a picture of such a guide for me in my Welsh tree climbing.

Living in many imaginary castles during childhood, you can see why this guide caught my attention.  "Wales" and a picture of a "castle"...wow I thought...got to get this book! [Soon learned this was a picture of Harlech Castle]

Written in 1969 by Wynford Waughan-Thomas and Alun Llewellyn, it provided me names, places, and pictures of what I was to discover was the home of my heart's blood.  Over the years, I have used this reference to read about places in Wales that had unusual names and at times very unique history. A fancy word "Gazetteer" is used to describe the content, but fancy words were always a challenge to me.

The introduction was the first written history of Wales that was to come across my mind.  It begins:

                                                           "Their Lord they will praise,
                                                             Their speech they will keep,
                                                             Their land they shall lose,
                                                             Except Wild Wales."

"Wild Wales"...my kind of place...thought I.  It must have been my genes talking at the time, since it would take me many years to figure out that this was indeed my place.  A guide book indeed it is.