Not sure how I can make this entry without doing justice to 25+ years of work by a distant cousin while not boring friends to death, so if you're not into the genealogy thing, you might wanna skip these posts. If you've ever done a little research on your own or ever wonder who your great grandfather was – keep reading.I've had a couple of posts on my genealogy research – to recap . . . we learned that Patrick's 6th great grandfather probably knew my 7th great grandfather, since they lived in the same small Massachusetts town of 100 people 300 years ago. And the family story that my great grandfather was actually an orphan was proven false, but this genealogy on my mother's side has to take the cake.
Here's the cliff notes version up until this point . . . after a bit of research (OK, a lot of research), I found one of my cousins, who also had the genealogy bug. He is technically my 4th cousin twice removed, which means that my 5th great grandmother, Jane Watkins, was his 3rd great grandmother. I'll spare the details on how we found each other, but the short answer is: The Internet - thanks Al Gore.
This breakthrough is kind of important, because up until this point the only thing I knew about my Mom's Welsh ancestors was that they were sheep farmers (not a rare occurrence in northern Wales), they left from Cardiganshire (not true), and they liked to read a lot (again, helpful if you're a librarian, not if you're actually trying to locate one person in a country of 5 million).
So after a couple of emails, I got in touch with Roy Watkins, who is basically every family's dream if you're trying to find out something about your distant ancestors. And it wasn't too much later that I invited myself over to Wales to see all that can be seen (I had to get back to Ireland somehow). Roy has spent the last 25 years researching the Watkins family line, and it really hasn't been easy at all.
Fortunately, it seems that for every stroke of bad luck (baptismal records for key family members no longer exist), fortune smiled on him with a little good luck (original marriage and legal documents from 300 years ago crossed his path all because he left his coat at an Archive and had to go back for it – more about those later).
So we pick up the story where my 3rd great grandfather left Wales for the New World around 1840's . . .
