Hannah Vaughan lived in Cusop!

St. Mary's, Cusop, Herefordshire, with daffodils and yews.

The new Hereford Archives and Records Center (HARC) is an excellent facility! In ease of use and space, it surpasses the LDS Church History Library. And . . . they let you handle original documents! It was busy yesterday morning with a dozen or so patrons. And everything ran like clockwork in the new, suburban setting with large windows looking out into the woods.

Every archive has its own rules and style. HARC was much more efficient than any I have used to date. I have to say, though, that Powys's new facility is also very good, its staff most friendly and helpful, but it is much smaller. And Gwent Archives in Ebbw Vale still has my heart because the service there was the most personal and friendly. But that's the Valleys, it is.

The National Library in Aberystwyth is also very good and very professional. They also gave me some personalized assistance in the one task I was after. I now need to go back which I will do in August. But it is an intimidatingly formal place with its huge, stately appearance up on the hill with the fantastic view looking out over the town to the Sea.

They are all wonderful archives, even CHL. And I appreciate them all. But it was at HARC yesterday that I found Hannah again. And the Holy Yew continues to call.

Hannah an Actual Spinster? (better than some things she could have been called...)

On the Family History records, you may notice that we have collected up Hannah, Joanna, and Johanna Vaughan as the same person. Those are common variations of the same name. She appears in several different places at different times: Cusop, Herefordshire; Hay, Breconshire; and Glasbury, Breconshire or Radnorshire (Glasbury was in both counties as the Wye River was the dividing line and kept changing course over the centuries). You will also see on a map that all three places are very close to each other, Cusop practically a suburb of the market town of Hay - even if across the national border of England/Wales. And Glasbury is just around the bend of the Wye with possible shortcuts over the hills of the northern tip of the Black Mountains that would avoid Hay.

I doesn't help that we're dealing with three counties and two countries in this little neighborhood

There is a significant issue with those connections in that Hannah/Joanna appears as the mother of illegitimate children in all three places. John 1789 christened in Hay, is the origin of our surname on the male line. She had a child previously, Thomas 1787, who was christened and buried in Cusop, Herefordshire. And she may have had a daughter Sarah, Christened 1796 in Glasbury - a year before Hannah/Joanna's father Roger Vaughan died in Glasbury.