The Grant Hotel, 283 East 24th Street, Ogden, Utah

Yesterday we went to a niece's wedding in Brigham City and the luncheon was Downtown Ogden on 25th Street just up from the Union Pacific Depot where several past generations of my family worked. Ogden has done some nice preservation and some upgrading downtown. It never quite became the Chicago of the Intermountain West as envisioned. The Railroads still move freight, but the yard is significantly diminished as evidenced by the wasteland under the 24th Street Bridge that used to span a half mile or so of bustling steam then diesel on multiple iron and steel rails.

Ogden, Utah Railyards, 1950s

Tantalizing Hints of Nonconformity

Ruins of Tredwstan [also "Tredustan"] Chapel built about 1690 near Talgarth, Breconshire.
Note the old gravestones still standing.

A researcher I've worked with once emailed that "Roger Vaughan" seemed like an uncommon name and shouldn't be too difficult to spot. Maybe that's true in the rest of Wales, but in the mid-Wye Valley it's rather common because of the illustrious ancestor who may or may not have fought and died at Agincourt. His father-in-law, Davey Gam, certainly did as Shakespeare even picked up on to include in Henry V. This Roger, the originator of our Vaughan surname, died somewhere. Maybe in the breach at Harfleur, or more likely of dysentery somewhere along the march and family legend preferred to have the death linked with that of the father-in-law's.

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!

How the Tithing Map Indexing is Going

We have already shared some work from crowd-sourcing or indexing the Tithing maps of Wales (1840s) for the National Library of Wales (here, here, and here). I just discovered that there are some parishes with the parcels now "clickable" to find who owned and occupied the place including Tract No. 44 in Llanfoist Village:

Clicking on box 44, this is what popped up on the right.

The Cynefin system is very different from FamilySearch.org indexing. One nice thing is that they list the names of the volunteers:

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.

Puddler at Forge

The mystery remains but we're closing in on how the sons of a fatherless butcher became puddlers in the South Wales iron works. A puddler was a skilled worker of some prestige in the boiling ores, blinding fires, and poisonous clouds of the industry.

The first indication we have is the 1851 census in which John and Elinor's son William Vaughan, age 21, is listed as "puddler at forge." What forge? We've wondered. And I only assumed, as there was no forge apparent in their resident village of Llanfoist, that it was the Blaenavon Ironworks over the Blorenge Mountain. It wouldn't be an impossible walk, if inconvenient, to travel over the mountain or maybe stay some days coming home on Sunday, likely the only day off, ever.

Then something came across my Facebook feed from Gwent Archives mentioning Llanfoist at the foot of the Blorenge and the tramways across the mountain:

the counter balanced incline planes at Llanfoist canal wharf which were part of Hill’s Tramroad, linking Blaenavon furnaces and Garnddyrys forge with the wharf to transport the wrought iron along the Brecon and Abergavenny Canal.

Garnddyrys forge! It was called a forge! "Puddler at forge" would likely refer to the closest forge in the vicinity along with the few other puddlers, rollers, or labourers "at forge" listed in the Census for Llanfoist.

Crossing the Carson River, 1859

The National Archives come through again!

I just discovered this wonderful pic in the public domain of Capt. Simpson's crossing of the Carson on his successful exploration of a new route across Nevada (that was almost immediately put to use by the Pony Express!) This is just on the northeast edge of what is now Carson City heading up river towards Genoa, then still Utah Territory. Elinor, Jane Vaughan, John and John S. Lewis would have known this site and perhaps crossed here.

John J. Young, Artist, from contemporaneous sketch by von Beckh (June 10, 1859)  (This sketch shows covered wagons being pulled on a raft the river and horses swimming. This sketch is Plate VII in Lt. J.H. Simpson's 1859 Journal of Explorations in Utah), National Archives Identifier: 305640 Local Identifier: 77-CWMF-MISC120(6), Creator: War Department. Office of the Chief of Engineers. 1818-9/18/1947.