Welsh grandma, something I didn’t know before

[Gonnagetgoingreturnsagain]

I just found out something quite sad about my family yesterday. To do with my grandmother on my dad’s side whom I didn’t know very well but only because my parents divorced when I was 5 and DM didn’t want contact with any of them.

My grandmother was Welsh from Abergavenny in south Wales and I know nothing about her, only the fact that the place where she’s from is a market town. I keep meaning to look up her maiden name.

I got speaking to a lovely Welsh woman on the bus yesterday and she told me that when my grandmother married my grandfather (who was English) she’d have been shunned and cut off from her Welsh community because of this. I don’t know how true this is but it would explain how her side of the family was never mentioned if I asked my dad. I’ve always been proud of my quarter Welsh heritage even though I don’t know much about this. I know the English and Welsh have a chequered history too with atrocities committed from the English side to the Welsh side from what I recall of history.

It’s even more sad because at one time she must’ve loved my grandad to have married him and had a child with him but apparently he wasn’t the easiest of men to live with and they had awful arguments and he developed Parkinson’s Disease in later life. How sad that she felt cut off from her Welsh family, if this is the case, and even if she’d wanted to have divorced him, probably wouldn’t have been welcomed back in her home town.

Well, grandma Peggy, I’m going to look into your maiden name and history soon just for you. And my other great grandma on the other side (that’s another story!).

I don’t even know as only a few photos if I look like my Welsh grandma and my half siblings I don’t speak to so can’t ask there.

Gosh how sad

I wouldn't take that as gospel. Abergavenny is close to the border, there'd have been lots of English people around and intermarrying. I think perhaps if you were from a more isolated and Welsh-speaking part of Wales it may have been different. My own grandfather was from a similar area and he definitely wasn't shunned when he married my nana (although this was in the sixties, not sure about earlier times).

That's a very sad story. I wonder when they were married though? I'm from Abergavenny, I don't know of any similar stories from around my grandmother's time. We are close to the English border and as a market town I can imagine there were lots of mixed relationships even back then.

Good luck with your search! If you are on Facebook it might be helpful to join the Abergavenny Voice group. There are often posts on there from people researching their family trees.

This woman was from Cardiff who I met and was adamant this was the case! I’d thought the same as you, as it’s close to the border there wouldn’t be so much of an issue. They got married I’m guessing in 1920s/30s maybe.

It’s such a pity my half sister isn’t very nice , because she must know more than me about that side of the family as she saw them a lot.

Thank you! I have no idea as to the truth of it. I hope it wasn’t the case.

My grandma bless her, didn’t drive and seemed a gentle soul from what my DM and half sister had to say about her.

I’ll join that FB group.

It’s one of those cases where you wish you’d made more of an effort to see these people and talked to them!

My mother, born 1925, had an aunt who married a Welsh man. She spent holidays with them in Llandudno. I think this must have been something to do with your family and not a general thing.

My Welsh grandma married an English man. No shunning involved, they lived in the community where my grandma had grown up and brought up 5 children there.

My other grandma, who moved to Wales from Ireland as a child was far more shunned.

I’m not sure I believe that she would have been shunned either. As previous posters have said that town is near the border anyway and the mines of South Wales were full of workers who moved from areas like the Forest of Dean or Ireland to work there.

Like I said I’ve got no idea! It was only this woman (from Cardiff) who was adamant my grandma would’ve been shunned.

I wish the dead could speak sometimes!

Exactly - in most recent history the border was not a heavily fought over entity but a vague division where people moved freely.

For reference my family come from deepest Herefordshire and my DNA is 50% welsh and approximately the same for English.

In this rural area including Monmouthshire the surname Jones, Morgan and Preece figure hugely.

I’ve got absolutely no idea (unless I ask my half sister) how they met (grandma and grandad).

I do have a half brother from my dad’s first marriage who I used to speak to but he’s not great on social media and messaging.

I hope that lady was wrong, although my Welsh grandmother was shunned after marrying my English grandfather according to my dad (their child) and other members of the family. He was younger than her and, while they were both working class, her family thought she’d married beneath her. She moved from south wales to be with him in the 40s, and by the sounds of things, the English thing didn’t help matters.

As it was it was a very unhappy marriage with violence and infidelity so it’s a sad story too, although she remarried in later years and was happy in the years I remember her with her second husband before they died in the early 2000s, so she got some peace in the end.

Good luck with your search, btw. Family history can be challenging but I find it fascinating.

Thanks! I used to work with a Rhodri Morgan a few years ago.

My family roots are in Newport, south of Abergavenny and east of Cardiff. They didn’t consider themselves welsh at all and have been proper irritable about all the dual language stuff. Enough that you didn’t want to get my dad started on it!

There will have been pockets of fierce nationalism, and pockets of anglophiles, so it very much depends on her particular community.

I would have expected you’d need to go further west to be shunned, though. Cardiff may have had a lot of ‘posh Welsh’ (cracker?), but Abergavenny was a more about farming, with mines further down the valleys.

Hi, i don't think this random stranger can know any of that about your grandmother! I'm Welsh, from Cardiff too, and I haven't really heard of anything like that. I can certainly believe it could have been true in some communities at that time, but not widespread enough to say that's what happened with your family. And as others have says Abergavenny is in Monmouthshire which is one of the least 'welsh' county in Wales in some ways.

Oops! That’s apparently offensive. I was thinking of the word Crachach which I understood to be old, posh, welsh speaking communities.

Apparently it’s now a slur suggesting there’s an elitist cabal with undue influence in power!

I thought it was people who sustained the old culture, eisteddfords and the like. The family I’m thinking of did clog dancing and played the harp and performed poetry and so on.

No reason to think what the woman told you was true. My grandparents were married in the 1920s and as far as I know were never shunned. The fact they never moved out of Wales suggests it wasn’t an issue and it certainly was never mentioned

My grandma married an Irish man. Not only that, she moved away to Dublin to do it.

She was still very close to her family and there was no nonsense about marrying a non Welsh man. She was from Llanelli.

I think that lady has spun you a tale! I wouldn't believe it until you do some research. My great-grandfather was from Anglesey. Many of his relatives/neighbours spoke no English at that time. He married an English woman (my great grandmother). Many of his siblings migrated to England or Canada for work. As others said, Abergavenny is close to the border and South Wales was full of people from all over the world in the mining industry.

I’m Welsh from Cardiff. I think the shunning is rubbish. The only shunning I know of is religious by the Plymouth Brethren. How could a random stranger know?

My Welsh side of the family would not be a surprise to you given my username. Without going into details of how it affected some of my ancestors, what you describe OP is no surprise.

What was interesting is this woman said when she returns to Wales she says all the road signs etc are in Welsh not English and that people tend to speak Welsh rather than English in shops e.g. in Cardiff. I haven't been to Cardiff for ages, certainly not since before lockdown so I wouldn't know and even if I did know, I certainly can't remember that! And then on the bus, she spoke to another woman of her age (70s-80s?) and they both spoke in Welsh and she agreed with her about the shunning (the other woman), this was in SE London. If the first woman was having me on then she certainly did a good job of it. She was, not that this makes any difference, mixed race, her grandchildren all were mixed race too (stunning woman and kids!) but of course, Shirley Bassey is from Wales. She also told me the port in Cardiff had closed down.

The only thing which I know of, is my DM said when we were kids, we went to visit friends in North Wales somewhere (it reminded me of Heidi land with chalets, mountains and goats and sheep on rocks/grass). DM said she walked into a pub where everyone was speaking in English and as soon as she and my stepdad went to order drinks, apparently the locals switched from English into Welsh and ignored them! This was at the time when the Welsh were setting fire to cottages bought by the English for holiday homes though.

I worked with some people from various parts of Wales last year for a few months and they were so funny and lovely - one colleague told me about all the celebs she'd seen locally - don't ask me where as I don't know and not just Michael Sheen either!

Regardless, I still want to find out more about my grandma Peggy.

30 years ago you didn’t hear Welsh in Cardiff. Now you do, but English is still dominant. I like hearing the variety, but you don’t ’need’ Welsh there- and it doesn’t particularly favour you career wise unless perhaps in local government or the BBC.

What was interesting is this woman said when she returns to Wales she says all the road signs etc are in Welsh not English and that people tend to speak Welsh rather than English in shops e.g. in Cardiff

She is telling you a load of shit, tbh. Road signs are in Welsh and English. Cardiff is generally English speaking. And if people speak in Welsh in Wales, what is the problem exactly?

DM said she walked into a pub where everyone was speaking in English and as soon as she and my stepdad went to order drinks, apparently the locals switched from English into Welsh and ignored them!
This is the most annoying nonsense OP. I know it’s not you, it’s someone else saying it to you, but it’s really obvious nonsense only repeated by people who fail to understand that Welsh is a real language that people really live their lives in. If the people in the pub were all Welsh speakers they wouldn’t have been speaking English. They just wouldn’t, because their language is Welsh. Would random groups of French people in France all speak English to each other? Of course not. The same is true in Wales. And anyway, how would anyone know what language people were speaking before they came into a building? They may have heard one of the frequent English or English adjacent words used in Welsh, but I think it’s just a story people tell themselves.
I’ve never heard of anybody being shunned for not marrying a Welsh person either.