Uncle William Vaughan 1768 Leasing from Viscount Hereford in 1847

Well, I'd found it before but it sort of shocked me when it popped up on the bottom of the page I was crowd-sourcing for the National Library of Wales, Tithing Maps project. These pages can get very tedious especially going through multiple pages of the property of Viscount Hereford, i.e., Robert Devereux, 15th Viscount Hereford, who held the title from 1843-1855. And the funny thing is that William Vaughan is there sort of out of place in the middle of the Viscount's vast Tregoyd Estate which was farther up the road. ["Tregoyd," by the way, is bastardized English for "Tregoed" or "Woodtown/village/home." Never ask a dang Saxon to translate Cymraeg for you!]

This is kind of sad, too, because William, brother of Hannah/Joanna Vaughan 1763, was in this home likely from before 1832 when he shows up on a Voter Register living at Fir Tree Cottage in Freehold - which would have qualified him to be a voter. Some economic reversal made him a tenant of the Viscount in the same home by 1847. William shows up with the approximately correct ages in the Censuses of 1841 and 1851 on the same street of "Heolegare" [very bad Welsh! Should be Heol-y-gaer."] And he is a former butcher!

Honing in on William Vaughan (1768) and Fir Tree Cottage (1798-1851)

Fir Tree Cottage, home of William Vaughan (1768) and likely John Vaughan (1789)

We were in the right neighborhood, just a bit down the road. I clinched it when I skimmed through the Glasbury tithing maps of 1847 that I've been "crowd-source" indexing and found lot no. 680 tithed by William Vaughan. When I looked at the overlay on the modern map, it fit right on, or close enough to, the existing houses. I'll put in the letter here I wrote to "Resident Family" that explains all the connections. The clincher, of course, is the fir tree.

Order in All Things - More Discoveries in Glasbury

Cottage at Heol-y-gaer by the lane heading west towards Glasbury.

© Copyright Jonathan Billinger and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

It was a very late night as I was excited to find two documents each relating to two people in our family history. And they helped confirm the location of where one of our ancestors lived in a home that still appears to still exists in Glasbury, Wales.

This morning, we went to the Bountiful Temple after late arising and parked near the opening to the underground lot so we could get in easily in the snowfall. My wife had a couple of family names for initiatory and I went to work at the veil. It's not hard work. It is interesting that with all the "priestly class," men and women performing ordinances in the temple, there is no monetary pay. We do pay the custodians as well as the cafeteria and laundry workers. That's how the whole world should work.