Welsh Journals

The strong showing of Welsh surnames today is, of course, partly due to their paucity. About 40 names seem to cover roughly 95 per cent of the Welsh wherever they occur. The names are mainly patron- ymics, either in the Anglicized or Welsh form. The limited number of names thus produced would naturally enhance their position in a rank-order list, but Welsh surnames are sufficiently prominent among the English, Scottish and Irish names to suggest that the holders of such names entered in considerable numbers during the colonial settlement, and certainly from the late 17th Century (Dodd, 1957). Given the minór nature of 19th Century migration, only a strong and early start seems sufficient to produce today's sur- name inheritance. The second sample of evidence comes from the South. In a modern plat book for Sunflower County, Mississippi (Sunflower County Farm Bureau, 1957) the names of landowners together with the details of their holdings are shown. Sunflower County is a prosperous cotton producing area around the town of Indianola in the western part of the state, far from the traditional areas of Welsh settlement (in 1900 only 30 Welsh-born were recorded in the whole state). Yet even here, of the 1,600 owners listed, 19 carry the surname Jones, and in all, roughly 7 per cent have surnames that could be assumed to be of Welsh origin. In this area few of the landowners would be black, and it is a fair guess that their ancestors colonised this area from the Carolinas and Georgia, also areas lacking association with major Welsh settlement. Together the three states contained only 83 Welsh-born in 1900. It seems to require a considerably greater Welsh presence at an earlier phase to explain the surname distribut- ion in Sunflower County, and in the many other deep-Southern counties which resemble it. The third sample of evidence takes this line of argument a step further. No Welsh visitor to the United States can have failed to observe the large number of black-Americans who possess distinct- ively Welsh surnames. For example in the 1975-6 season, 432 black Americans played in senior, professional (American) footbaU teams. Of these 56, that is almost 13 per cent, carried Welsh surnames (Anon, 1975), and roughly the same proportion might be found among any representative group of blacks. Now in 19th. Century America a surname was the privilege of a free man. Negro slaves were known only by given names and so most black-American surnames did not emerge until the 1860's (Williamson, 1965). Then they chose their own. Some adopted nicknames, some chose names connected with their work, some took the names of national heroes (Washington was a favourite), but most seem to have assumed the surnames of their former masters, or of a respected white neighbour. Whichever way it was, Welsh surnames must have been fairly common in the South during the period of Reconstruction in the 1860's and 1870's.