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Welsh Americans
Welsh Americans (Welsh: Americanwyr Cymreig) are an American ethnic group whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in Wales, United Kingdom. In the 2008 U.S. Census community survey, an estimated 1.98 million Americans had Welsh ancestry, 0.6% of the total U.S. population. This compares with a population of 3 million in Wales. However, 3.8% of Americans appear to bear a Welsh surname.
There have been several US presidents with Welsh ancestry, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James A. Garfield, Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon, and Barack Obama. Other prominent figures of Welsh descent in American history include Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America.
The proportion of the American population with a name of Welsh origin ranges from 9.5% in South Carolina to 1.1% in North Dakota. Typically, names of Welsh origin are concentrated in the mid-Atlantic states, New England, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama and in Appalachia, West Virginia and Tennessee.
Welsh Voyages and settlements in America are said to have taken place in the twelfth century, led by Madoc the son of Owain Gwynedd, and prince of the Kingdom of Gwynedd. References to these voyages are found within Medieval Welsh literature and Welsh folklore, but are generally dismissed by modern authors. The Madog legend attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era (the Tudors being of Welsh ancestry) when Welsh and English writers used it bolster British claims in the New World versus those of Spain, France and Portugal. The earliest surviving full account of Madoc's voyage, as the first to make the claim that Madoc had come to America, appears in Humphrey Llwyd 1559 Cronica Walliae, an English adaptation of the Brut y Tywysogion. No archaeological, linguistic, or other evidence of Madoc or his voyages has been found in the New or Old World but legends connect him with certain sites, such as Devil's Backbone on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky.
In 1810, John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee, wrote to his friend Major Amos Stoddard about a conversation he had had in 1782 with the old Cherokee chief Oconostota concerning ancient fortifications built along the Alabama River. The chief allegedly told him that the forts had been built by a group of White people called "Welsh", as protection against the ancestors of the Cherokee, who eventually drove them from the region.
Sevier had also written in 1799 of the alleged discovery of six skeletons in brass armor bearing the Welsh coat-of-arms. Thomas S. Hinde claimed that in 1799, six soldiers had been dug up near Jeffersonville, Indiana on the Ohio River with breastplates that contained Welsh coat of arms. It is possible these were the same six Sevier referred to, as the number, brass plates and Welsh coat of arms are consistent with both references. Speculation abounds connecting Madog with certain sites, such as Devil's Backbone, located on the Ohio River at Fourteen Mile Creek near Louisville, Kentucky.
The first modern documented Welsh arrivals came from Wales after 1618. In the mid to late seventeenth century, there was a large emigration of Welsh Quakers to the Colony of Pennsylvania, where a Welsh Tract was established in the region immediately west of Philadelphia. By 1700, Welsh people accounted for about one-third of the colony's estimated population of twenty thousand. There are a number of Welsh place names in this area. The Welsh were especially numerous and politically active and elected 9% of the members of the Pennsylvania Provincial Council.[citation needed]
In 1757, Rev. Goronwy Owen, an Anglican Vicar born at Y Dafarn Goch, in the parish of Llanfair Mathafarn Eithaf in Anglesey and whose contribution to Welsh poetry is most responsible for the subsequent Welsh eighteenth century Renaissance, emigrated to Williamsburg, in the Colony of Virginia. Until his death on his cotton and tobacco plantation near Lawrenceville, Virginia in 1769, Rev. Owen was mostly noted as an émigré bard, writing with hiraeth ("longing" or "homesickness") for his native Anglesey. During the subsequent revival of the Eisteddfod, the Gwyneddigion Society held up the poetry of Rev. Owen as an example for bards at future eisteddfodau to emulate.[citation needed]
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Welsh Americans
Welsh Americans (Welsh: Americanwyr Cymreig) are an American ethnic group whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in Wales, United Kingdom. In the 2008 U.S. Census community survey, an estimated 1.98 million Americans had Welsh ancestry, 0.6% of the total U.S. population. This compares with a population of 3 million in Wales. However, 3.8% of Americans appear to bear a Welsh surname.
There have been several US presidents with Welsh ancestry, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James A. Garfield, Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon, and Barack Obama. Other prominent figures of Welsh descent in American history include Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America.
The proportion of the American population with a name of Welsh origin ranges from 9.5% in South Carolina to 1.1% in North Dakota. Typically, names of Welsh origin are concentrated in the mid-Atlantic states, New England, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama and in Appalachia, West Virginia and Tennessee.
Welsh Voyages and settlements in America are said to have taken place in the twelfth century, led by Madoc the son of Owain Gwynedd, and prince of the Kingdom of Gwynedd. References to these voyages are found within Medieval Welsh literature and Welsh folklore, but are generally dismissed by modern authors. The Madog legend attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era (the Tudors being of Welsh ancestry) when Welsh and English writers used it bolster British claims in the New World versus those of Spain, France and Portugal. The earliest surviving full account of Madoc's voyage, as the first to make the claim that Madoc had come to America, appears in Humphrey Llwyd 1559 Cronica Walliae, an English adaptation of the Brut y Tywysogion. No archaeological, linguistic, or other evidence of Madoc or his voyages has been found in the New or Old World but legends connect him with certain sites, such as Devil's Backbone on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky.
In 1810, John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee, wrote to his friend Major Amos Stoddard about a conversation he had had in 1782 with the old Cherokee chief Oconostota concerning ancient fortifications built along the Alabama River. The chief allegedly told him that the forts had been built by a group of White people called "Welsh", as protection against the ancestors of the Cherokee, who eventually drove them from the region.
Sevier had also written in 1799 of the alleged discovery of six skeletons in brass armor bearing the Welsh coat-of-arms. Thomas S. Hinde claimed that in 1799, six soldiers had been dug up near Jeffersonville, Indiana on the Ohio River with breastplates that contained Welsh coat of arms. It is possible these were the same six Sevier referred to, as the number, brass plates and Welsh coat of arms are consistent with both references. Speculation abounds connecting Madog with certain sites, such as Devil's Backbone, located on the Ohio River at Fourteen Mile Creek near Louisville, Kentucky.
The first modern documented Welsh arrivals came from Wales after 1618. In the mid to late seventeenth century, there was a large emigration of Welsh Quakers to the Colony of Pennsylvania, where a Welsh Tract was established in the region immediately west of Philadelphia. By 1700, Welsh people accounted for about one-third of the colony's estimated population of twenty thousand. There are a number of Welsh place names in this area. The Welsh were especially numerous and politically active and elected 9% of the members of the Pennsylvania Provincial Council.[citation needed]
In 1757, Rev. Goronwy Owen, an Anglican Vicar born at Y Dafarn Goch, in the parish of Llanfair Mathafarn Eithaf in Anglesey and whose contribution to Welsh poetry is most responsible for the subsequent Welsh eighteenth century Renaissance, emigrated to Williamsburg, in the Colony of Virginia. Until his death on his cotton and tobacco plantation near Lawrenceville, Virginia in 1769, Rev. Owen was mostly noted as an émigré bard, writing with hiraeth ("longing" or "homesickness") for his native Anglesey. During the subsequent revival of the Eisteddfod, the Gwyneddigion Society held up the poetry of Rev. Owen as an example for bards at future eisteddfodau to emulate.[citation needed]
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