Homogenous hats - and other happenings…
Perhaps unsurprisingly this 1950s gathering shown below in Moriah Baptist Chapel, Coelbren, then busiest place of worship in the village, is composed almost entirely of cousins to varying degrees; only two or three of the ladies are not called Jeffreys, Jones, Kemeys or Lewis. By this time, the Morgan name had disappeared from our families.
The names mainly recurring in our families are thus Benjamin, James, Jeffreys, Jones, Lewis and Morgan. Alliances between these families are evident from the beginning of available records (here, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century). Except for Morgan, whose harbinger Richard Morgan (1828-1903) arrived relatively late on the scene, in the mid 1870s, from the Lywel area, the families are long-established in this area, colonising many of the farm holdings in the nineteenth century and not looking too far when it came to marrying their children.
Richard Morgan was one of the founding fathers of Coelbren and his children grew up to participate fully in the life of the growing village. A few of them had their own large families whose descendants still live in the area. However, as we will now see, although Richard and Gwenllian Morgan had three sons, a combination of tragic circumstances halted the male Morgan line and name.
Below: it’s a pity another of the Jeffreys didn’t marry another of the Evans Price’s Arms family to complete this almost perfect quadrilateral. This neatly encapsulates some of the close inter-family connections made amongst Coelbren families towards the end of the nineteenth century. It would seem that everyone was someone else’s brother or sister-in-law!
