Across the pond

Much as I admire the building I shall not be swanning down the M4 to the Millenium Stadium in Cardiff on Friday to join thousands of others blessed, or cursed, with the surname Jones. The event is organised by the Welsh television channel S4 and they hope to break the world record for an extended family gathering. They hope to have all manner of famous Jones, including Tom Jones, whom I am told is a singer, and Jack Jones, whom I saw at the Trade Union Congress in Brighton in September who is still spry aged 22.

I shall be doing my bit to reduce the climate change which is threatening the planet. But that is not the reason I am not going. The event re-aroused my curiosity about my own genetic heritage and also the general question as to whether it matters. So I did a little research on the web. I discovered a research project at University College London which is establishing the regional pattern of surnames in. The url is:

http://www.spatial-literacy.org/UCLnames/

The team running it are:

Professor Paul Longley : Project development
Professor Richard Webber : Project co-ordinator and content
Dr Daryl Lloyd : Co-data manager
Alex Singleton : Co-data manager & website manager

The British data is based largely on the 1881 and 1998 censuses. If you go into their web site you can key in your own names and get up some maps showing where the greatest concentration of people with your own surname is.

The results for my own family were quite dramatic. The maps are colour coded with purple, red, brown, yellow and white in descending order of concentration. The Jones results for 1881 show Wales as purple, red and brown, with the rest of Britain white except for a few of the border counties. Even by 1998 the three deepest colours are still in Wales, though the yellow has extended into the west midlands and into Devon.

When I keyed in my mother’s maiden name, Hughes, the results for 1881 are almost exactly the same. In 1998 the pattern is again very similar, though by then the yellow had also spread to parts of north west England and western Scotland.

The UCL team label both Jones and Hughes as Celtic surnames. And the evidence they are producing backs up that. Increasingly, however, I am coming around to the view that the belief in both my mother’s and father’s family that we originally came from Wales was wrong. One of my cousins did some research a few years ago which showed that the Hughes had always been iin towns near to Wolverhampton as far back as the sixteenth century. On the Jones side I knew that my great grandfather was born in Walsall in 1840. A few weeks ago I did some research on the web and found that his father was born in Walsall in 1807. It is still possible that his father might have come from Wales at the time of the industrial revoltion so I shall have to do some more work.

However, the probability is that I am not Celtic. My great-grandfather was a giant of a man, tall and broad and weighing 35 stone. He was a horse collar maker. His father was also in leather, but he made shoes. And shoe making was a specialty in parts of both the east and west Midlands.

My curiosity is aroused. I particularly want to know why my great grandfather was a Roman Catholic, because in the Midlands nearly all the Roman Catholics were Irish, apart from a very small minority of the upper classes. So deep down perhaps I am hoping to discover that we have blue blood, rather than Celtic blood, in our veins.

Checking a few dates with my sister nourished yet another fantasy. She was leafing through an old diary of my father’s sister, in which she kept birth and death dates. In it she found a Guggenheim. Perhaps somewhere in the family tree there is a rich American? Maybe he left us some money which is waiting for us in some bank on Wall Street? Sadly the likelihood is that Guggeheim was no relation but a client of my aunt’s dressmaking business.

But I want find the answers to these questions in Cardiff, where all the Celtic Joneses will be gathering. I shall have to go to Walsall. The birth certificate on the web shows his name as Janes. But this is based on an interpretation of the handwriting in the original document, so it is possible that whoever transcribed it made a mistake. The only way to find out is to seek out the original in Walsall.

I also want to find out a bit more about why both Joneses and Hugheses are so concentrated in Wales. As I understand it both names were originally a corruption of John’s Son and Hugh’s son. So why more in Wales than England, Scotland or Ireland?

And so to the final question, does in matter who our genetic ancestors were and where they came from? My reason says not much. This view was re-inforced a few days ago when I was writing about adoption. I think that the influence on the character of the child of de facto parents is much more important than the genetic parents. Nevertheless my curiosity persists. So I shall try and watch the Jones programme in Friday evening and hope that everyone will not be yapping away in Welsh.