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My paternal ancestors came from Kidwelly, Wales. A poverty-stricken teenaged brother and sister walked to a port in England and were sent to Nevis, a Caribbean island. He cut down trees so the Black slaves could plant sugar when they arrived later and she was a spinner. I don’t think they were paid. After three years, they were dropped off on the shore of North Carolina.

Where the heck are my reparations?

And, btw, the first time I laid eyes on a Welsh Corgi, I knew I had to have one. That was in 1966, and our family has had them ever since. Didn’t know until later that our ancestors came from Wales.

There are mysterious ties to our ancestors, I believe. I am a rare person who loves bagpipe music and I have Scottish ancestry. Some of my ancestors originated from France. They were Huguenots driven from France and a group of them settled in Ireland and adopted a new surname from the area they settled. So that is right now a big brick wall to piercing the French lines. I find genealogy endlessly fascinating.

My great grandfather was born in Wales in 1842. As a young child, he worked in the lead mines near Ysbty Ystwyth. His father made shoes for the miners. The balance of the family raised sheep in Llanfihangel-y-Creuddyn. The butched sheep provided meat and leather for shoes. The lucky sheep were just fleeced for wool. At age 11, my great grandfather was too big to enter the mine, so he was reassigned to watch the sheep. He "escaped" to liverpool where he worked until age 18. At that point he sought passage to the USA and signed on as "ship's company" to pay for his passage. On arrival, he found his sweetheart from Aberystwyth. To impress her father, he joined the Union Army and found himself shortly on a flatbed rail car on the way to the civil war front. He was shortly taken prisoner by the Confederates and spent the balance of the war in a Confederate POW camp. He survived and returned to Pittsburgh to marry his sweetheart. They raised 19 children. My grandfather and his twin brother were the youngest born in 1887. My great grandfather passed in 1912.

I visited Llanfihangel-y-Creuddyn in the late 1990s. The cemetery headstones have my family surname going back to the mid 1400s. The village is still doing well in the present time. My great grandfather's childhood home still stands down the hill from the lead mine at Ysbty Ystwyth.