South Wales
Jonathan Scott surveys the crucial resources for anyone with roots in the south of the Principality
The launch of the Wales Collection on Findmypast in 2012 changed the landscape for remote researchers with roots in South Wales. The National Library of Wales (NLW) teamed up with a consortium of Welsh county archivists, providing baptism, banns, marriage and burial records for the project, which has expanded in the intervening years. Although gaps remain other sources have joined, and Findmypast has recently combined marriages and banns to make searching easier.
Since we last paid a visit to South Wales three years ago, the NLW has continued its programme of digitisation. The wills database and crime and punishment collection have now been joined by websites offering access to Welsh newspapers, tithe maps and sources from the First World War.
Things on the ground have been changing too. The NLW’s building in Aberystwyth is being refurbished – the first phase of work is due to be completed early next year. And researchers with roots in Carmarthenshire are awaiting the opening of Y Stordy, a £2.6 million archive centre being constructed at the rear of Carmarthen Library. The collections have been housed in Cardiff since the archives at Parc y Myrddin closed six years ago.
South Wales is served by Carmarthenshire, Glamorgan, Gwent, Pembrokeshire and West Glamorgan archives, as well as Dyfed, Glamorgan and Gwent family history societies. All
‘The area was historically dominated by coal and, in Swansea, copper’
can help you delve into census returns, parish records and more.
In terms of your ancestors’ working lives, the area was historically dominated by coal and, in Swansea, copper. The South Wales Coalfield extends from parts of Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire in the west, through Swansea, Neath
Port Talbot, Bridgend County Borough, Rhondda Cynon Taf, Merthyr Tydfil, Caerphilly County Borough and Blaenau Gwent to Torfaen in the east.
Local Industry
While all the smaller county archives featured here have material relating to local businesses and heavy industry (Glamorgan, for example, is currently cataloguing its accident and compensation registers – see glamarchives.wordpress.com), there are specialist collections for researching miners. Swansea University’s Richard Burton Archives at the Singleton Park Library looks after the South Wales Coalfield Collection, which holds records of trade unions, including the South Wales Miners’ Federation, miners’ institutes and cooperative societies. There’s also the South Wales Miners’
Library located in the university’s Hendrefoelan Campus in Sketty.
Swansea meanwhile was the centre of the world’s copper production, producing everything from coins to copper-plated hulls for Royal Navy ships. The Copper Business Archives collection is also kept at the Richard Burton Archives, and you can find out more about the industry via welshcopper.org.uk.
With all of the archives and libraries across South Wales, it’s important to plan – check opening times, book appointments if necessary and bring a reader’s ticket/proof of ID. You also need to remember that parish material may have been assigned to archives according to deanery rather than county boundaries. The NLW has a large country-wide collection of about 500 parishes (on microfilm) on open access in the South Reading Room, and there’s free access to findmypast.co.uk and Ancestry Library Edition.
Glamorgan Archives covers all of the historic county, serving the borough councils of Bridgend, Caerphilly, Merthyr Tydfil, Rhondda Cynon Taf and the Vale of Glamorgan, as well as the City and County of Cardiff. It also has ecclesiastical parish records of the diocese of Llandaff and the archdiocese of Cardiff. Since December 2016 the archive’s electronic catalogue has been made available online.
The archive holds important estate/family collections. And since most of the land in
Glamorgan was once owned by a few wealthy families, if your ancestry can be traced back that far, you could find records of them as tenants or employees.
The West Glamorgan Archive Service, meanwhile, covers the city and county of Swansea and the borough of Neath Port Talbot – the oldest item here being the Neath Abbey charter of 1129. Local collections include shipping registers and crew agreements for the port of Swansea, alongside ecclesiastical parish records, electoral records, General Register Office indexes and records generated by local Poor Law unions and schools. The Swansea Hebrew
Congregation collection includes marriage registers and burial records back to the mid-Victorian era, and minutes, correspondence and financial records.
Estate collections include leases, rentals and maps, and can provide tenancy records back to the 17th century. The NLW in Aberystwyth is also home to many collections, including genealogical sources covering South Wales such as nonconformist records, Bishops’ Transcripts, electoral registers, probate records, poll books, land tax assessments and estate collections. There are a number of national museums covering the area too; you can see the subjects and attractions available at museum. wales. This also leads to many interesting online exhibitions. One recent example looks at the history, working conditions and sporting exploits of the munitionettes who worked in the National Explosives Factory in Pembrey during the First World War (see bit.ly/pembrey-fac).
Finally, South Wales researchers should investigate places.library. wales, which offers access to over 1,200 digitised tithe maps from the Principality, searchable by map or the associated apportionment data. These were often the earliest large-scale maps of many towns and villages in Wales, and the apportionments contain vital information about ownership, acreage, crops, field names and occupancy.