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We were seated in her cool flagged kitchen, drinking her tea, enjoying those ambrosial cakes. We had been fishing, with no luck. I was now fishing for information. I was digging into the past. Long before the days when she had been housekeeper to the successful Cardiff merchant she had been a schoolgirl in the village, and she began to talk about her childhood. She remembered the death of her grandfather William. It had been an impressive occasion. The roads had been too bad to follow the natural route up the river valley, so the cortege had to travel north, then turn east, then south, before reaching the little church perched on a green hill high above the muted music of the river. A peaceful place, as I found out for myself much later but this was over thirty years ago, and the old lady was talking about events that had taken place in 1880, when William had been laid to rest beside his wife Ann under the ancient yew at the west end of the churchyard. She remembered her uncle William, her father's eldest brother, at the funeral. She thought he had gone to live down country This was taken to mean Herefordshire, but could well have applied to somewhere in the valley bottom a day's journey from her kitchen. There had been two other brothers, John and Henry, and at least one sister Ann, but she remembered little of them. Indeed, her little excursion into the past, prompted by my curiosity, was short-lived. Soon we were away and the matter was never raised again. Death, and The War intervened, and it was some time before the Census Returns were again open to inspection. I chose the return for 1841 for the parish where the old lady spent her last years, and, sure enough, under the heading of the little farm that still stands beside that rippling stream were the names of William, aged 40, agricultural labourer, Anne his wife, of the same age, Anne their daughter, aged 10, Henry one of their sons aged 7. At homesteads in adjoining parishes were the names of John, 14, agricultural servant, and Roger (the old lady's father) aged 15, both in service a mile or so from home. The 1851 Census gave 59 as a more realistic age for William and Ann and indicated the parishes of their birth. I was able, much later, to see the register, for William's parish. It gave me a Roger who died in 1809, aged 61, with children including a William born in 1792, but with no guide as to Roger's baptism or where William spent his early manhood. A journey to the National Library of Wales soon solved both problems, but it was necessary to read a large number of Bishop's Transcripts. Although I had journeyed back two centuries in time, I had not moved far geographically, for I found what I wanted in two neighbouring parishes. Roger had been baptised in that remote church that stands in a circular graveyard, one winter's day in 1748. His elder brother James had been baptised there about the time of the '45 Rebellion, but his younger brother and sisters had been baptised in the shadow of that great rock that stands close to the church of Paternus, where you can lie on the graveyard wall and watch the trout darting the stream below. ROOTS IN THE AIR By E. J. L. COLE, F.S.A.