When you have exhausted the maps and the visual images of the area in which you are interested,what is left to help you trace your family and the lands on which they lived? The answer is the deeds and documents of estates like Picton Castle, Powys or Wynnstay. Most Welsh land was tenanted and this means that paperwork was created as land was leased, sold or exchanged and rents were paid to landlords. If you are unsure as to which estate owned the land, the tithe map and schedule can help you, the conservatism of land tenure in Wales often means that the owners at the time of the 1836 Tithe Act had been owners for centuries. However, using these papers is not always easy.
To begin with, estate and manorial records such as rentals and surveys, are not always catalogued according to place name but according to parish. In other words, there might very well be a mention of a farm in a rental but it will not appear in the Library’s catalogue, you will need to search under the parish name. Another problem, especially with earlier documents, is that the land may only be mentioned according to township or field name. The reason for this is clear, farms as we know them today with a farmhouse and a collection of fields grouped around them are an invention of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – and yes, I know I am oversimplifying a complex process – before this consolidation took place, land was held by family and, even after the 1282 Conquest and the growth of estates in Wales, this system stayed in place, each family had a gwely of land with which it was associated. This is why the Welsh, incidentally, became so hooked on genealogy, as who you were decided your rights to land. Now, the absence of farms meant that when land needed to be particularly identified, it was done by field name.
A good example is my mother’s family farm. Owned by Coed Coch, indeed the first of my family to live there back in 1627, was a sister to the man who built Coed Coch itself, it is known as Meysydd as far back as the estate mapping for Glan Conway in circa 1780. I can trace the fields much further back than that, some of the field names associated with that farm can be seen in fifteenth century documents belonging to the estate and I can find them because I know them. I know them because they appear on the early map and on the tithe schedule and I also know them because we had an unbroken tenancy and then ownership of the farm until the nineteen eighties so I had learnt them as I visited the farm as a child. But it is by field name that I trace.One of the sad things about the recent change in rural population in Wales is the way field names are disappearing and with that a gateway into our past. Luckily, some tithe schedules and nearly all sale catalogues do record field names because as we lose them we lose our history as well as a means of accessing past history.
There is another problem inherent with looking for documents in estate papers, Welsh orthography, the way in which words are spelt, was not standardised in Welsh until the beginning of the twentieth century, Welsh is also a language of great variety of dialect pronunciations as well as being a phonetic language which causes problems to English speakers attempting to write what they hear. Added to that, some remnants of medieval Welsh orthography continues to make its presence felt. The end result is that you may need to practice serendipity if you are looking for a property. Cae may be spelt Cae or Kay, or even.Cai. Only last week, I came across a small plas on Radnorshire now called The Skreene but in the fifteen seventies, it was called Tyr ynys crin.
Are your family named in these documents? Well, they will be named but not indexed as such in rentals and household accounts but they should appear indexed in the Library’s catalogues when they rent and lease and sell land or borrow money on it! And they may well appear if they were poachers or other miscreants or, to be fair, estate managers who corresponded with their masters.
The last question is how do you access these? The simplest way by far is through ISYS web because
of two things which make life easier for readers. One is that ISYS web clearly identifies the collections in which your references may be found. Results are listed alphabetically by collection name which allows you to choose the collection you need and then work through its references. Secondly, the terms for which you are looking are highlighted by red arrows for further references in that catalogue and green ones for references in the previous and subsequent catalogues to the one in which you are working. You may access ISYS web through the Library’s web page by choosing catalogues and then scrolling down the listed options until you see archives and manuscripts. Alternatively, you can try the web address -
If you do have a query about the Library’s collections or services, do please contact the enquiries team on
http://www.llgc.org.uk/index.php?id=nlwenquiries
Do not despair if the Library does not hold the archives you need, they may well be held by another archive centre and you can find them by either using the [British]national archive’s register of collections or using www.archivesnetworkwales.info