Irish-Welsh Ancestry

My grandfather was adopted as a child, and his parents' identity had been a mystery to me. After years of research and then a DNA test, I finally uncovered his parents’ identity and their ancestry. For a while I had believed his father to be William Johnson, my feeling had been correct, and the DNA test is what confirmed it. William Johnson was born at ten minutes past eleven o'clock on the night of November 19th, 1904, at 40 Upper Mercer Street in Dublin, Ireland. The precise moment of his...

Roots in the Valleys of Wales Martha Ann Davies was born into a world of industrial turbulence on December 23, 1911, at 18 Penlan Street in Pentrebach, just south of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. She was the third child of George Adley Davies and Mary Elizabeth Rogers. Her father, George, came from a family shaped by the coal and iron industries. His grandfather had migrated from the Swansea Valley sixty-five years earlier seeking work. George himself had laboured as a collier before becoming a bill...

Florence Lock was 9 years old when she entered the workhouse. She would spend the next 10 years inside the walls of Victorian institutions. Discover the hidden life of a Victorian orphan, documented in her own correspondence.