Odol Trefechan

Henblas

Chapter 5: John Jones and his family

John Jones, my great-grandfather, was 21 when he married Ann Hughes in October 1841, and Ann was 23. The marriage was witnessed by Elizabeth Hughes, Ann's mother, and Joseph Jones - whom I at first assumed to be John's father but later found was his elder brother. The first children of the marriage were twins named Joseph and Benjamin, who were baptised at Ysceifiog in July 1842, Joseph died in the following year and Benjamin in 1845. (Both on my father's side and my mother's side the 1840s seem to have been particularly unfortunate in view of the number of deaths that occurred.) There were also two daughters and two other sons, The elder of the two daughters, Elizabeth, was baptised in February 1844; and Mary Eleanor, my grandmother, was baptised on 23 September 1848, Mary Eleanor was registered in those names following her birth on the previous 19 August, the names presumably having been taken from John's mother Mary and Ann's younger sister Eleanor; but she was in fact baptised in the names of Mary Ellen. The two other sons were John junior, who was baptised in August 1846, and Edward, the youngest child, who was baptised in 1852. The 1851 census return shows that Elizabeth and John junior were born at Ysceifiog, whereas Mary Eleanor and Edward were born at Nannerch, This must mean that for the first five or six years after their marriage their parents continued to live with John's mother Mary at Odol Ganol and then moved to Odol Trefechan just over the boundary of Nannerch parish (the Tithe Map and Apportionment confirms this). Odol Trefechan, which still stands on a rather congested and unattractive site up a side road from the main Denbigh/Mold road (A541) was a fairly small holding of some 40 acres, Initially, my great-grand-parents farmed it with the assistance of one male and one female servant living in. By the time of the 1861 census, however, there were no longer any servants living in, but John and Ann may have had help from servants living out as well as from members of their own family. During the 1850s Mary Jones, then in her late seventies, came to Ddol Trefethan to live the rest of her life with her son, dying there in 1870. During the 1860s my grandmother, her sister Elizabeth, and her brother Edward left home arid by the time of the 1871 census only John junior remained there with his parents. I know virtually nothing else about life at Ddol Trefechan during this period except that, in common with life on many other small farms in the Clwydian Hills, it was hard and unprofitable and children were often tempted to seek their livelihood elsewhere. But one interesting little story came down to me through my father. He told me that his mother Mary Eleanor remembered standing, as a girl, in the fields above Trefechan with her parents and brothers and sisters, gazing at a giant comet which hung in the sky for several weeks and could even be distinguished in broad daylight. This must have been Donati's comet, which was such a spectacular sight in the autumn night skies of 1858, when my grandmother was ten years old.

Shortly after 1871, John and Ann Jones moved from Ddol Trefechan to Afon Wen, and it was there that Ann died in August 1871. She was buried at Caerwys with her twin sons Joseph and Benjamin. John Jones then married again. His second wife was Lucy (or Luzy) Hughes, the widow of David Hughes, who had lived at Henblas ("Old Hall") the next farmstead into the hills beyond Ddol Trefechan and had died at about the same time as Ann Jones herself. Lucy was the daughter of another John Jones, a farmer of Nannerch, and was about 13 years younger than my great-grandfather. The marriage took place in Liverpool in January 1875 and was witnessed by both my grandmother and my grandfather. There were no children of this second marriage but Lucy had two children - Margaret and Joseph - from her first marriage to David Hughes. John and Lucy Jones returned from Liverpool to live at Henblas and Ddol Trefechan passed into the possession of a family named Davies. John Jones eventually died at Henblas in February 1891 and was buried with Ann at Caerwys.

I have a very old photograph, taken on glass in the 1860s, showing John and Ann Jones in their "Sunday best". I was told by Edward Jones of Dyserth (who is, of course, also a great-grandson by descent through their eldest daughter Elizabeth) that John was a well educated man who composed and taught music - mainly Church music - in his later years. Edward Jones' own father, Albert Edward Jones of Dyserth, used to come from Liverpool to Henblas for his school holidays after the death of Roger Gresley Jones, Elizabeth's husband, and I gathered that there was a fair amount of friction between him and young Joseph Hughes (John Jones's stepson) mainly because Albert Edward could not speak Welsh. I also had an interesting talk about the old days at Henblas with Mrs Winifrid Leese of Stone, near Stoke-on-Trent, shortly before her death in 1976. Mrs Leese, who was the daughter of John Jones' youngest child, Edward, and his last surviving grandchild, told me that she also had stayed at Henblas as a young girl. But the visit was apparently short and somewhat unfortunate: she and another cousin had been given a cupboard bed to sleep in but had left early the next morning when they found they were covered with fleas! Henblas, a very old "long house" single storey building which is recorded as far back as the early 17th century, eventually passed out of the Jones family's possession early in the present century. For some years prior to 1978 it was uninhabited and in a state of decay, but it is now in process of conversion into two modern semi-detached stone cottages. These, although attractive enough, bear little resemblance to the old farmstead, but at least the site has been saved and is still occupied. During the conversion work the present owner found in the original wall a stone inscribed "Joseph Hughes 1887", and I was able to explain to him that this had probably marked the twenty-first birthday of John Jones's stepson.

In the next chapter I recount how John and Ann Jones's two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary Eleanor, went to Liverpool in the mid-1860s and married there. The youngest child, Edward, became a travelling salesman for Jaegers, the manufacturers of woollen goods, in the West Midlands and was always known as "Stocking Jones". He died at Stone in Staffordshire in about 1933 and his descendants are still to be found in that area. John and Ann Jones's other surviving child, John junior, continued to farm in North Wales and he eventually gave rise to what I may term "the Gwyddelwern connection". On more than one occasion my father told me and other members of the family that his mother Mary Eleanor had been born at Gwyddelwern, a village near Corwen on the River Dee some 20-25 miles from Ddol on the other side of the Clwydian Hills, and that the land on which she had been born had been in the family for about three hundred years. He also told me that my own mother had visited Gwyddelwern while she was in Wales in the summer of 1915 and had met members of the Jones family there. (This visit was apparently undertaken at the particular request of my grandmother.) It is quite clear that my father was wrong in saying that his mother had come from Gwyddelwern: the family references to Nannerch (see Chapter 1) were much more to the point because that is where she had in fact been born. But I was puzzled by the story of Gwyddelwern, because I felt that it must have at least some historical foundation; and I was even more baffled when I found that a John and Catherine Jones, previously of Gwyddelwern, had occupied Ddol Ganol during the second half of the last century and were buried in the small Methodist churchyard beside the main road at Odol. So far as I could see, there was no reason why my family should have been connected in any way with Gwyddelwern, and it was only when I met Mrs Leese that the true story emerged. She told me that in his middle age John junior had moved to Park farm at Oerwen, near Gwyddelwern, and had married Sarah Jones of Plas Lelo - a very old and rather forbidding farmstead in a grove of trees on the hill road between Oerwen and Gwyddelwern. There was, however, no other connection between the Joneses of Odol and those of Plas Lelo, although as a fact the latter had lived there for very many years. Nor was there any traceable connection between either of these families and John and Catherine Jones who had later lived at Odol Ganol. (Their house in Gwyddelwern had in any case been Bryndu, and not Plas Lelo.) Mrs Leese told me that she had visited Plas Lelo, as well as Henblas, when she was a young girl and had been terrified by a church organ installed in one of the rooms there, which one of the older Joneses used to play late at night. She added that John and Sarah Jones of Plas Lelo had four children (my grandmother's nephews and nieces), and almost certainly these would have been the relatives my mother met in 1915 - even if John and Sarah themselves were no longer there. The last known survivor of that generation was John Edward Jones, who managed the Blue Bell Inn in Gwyddelwern village - now converted into two or three separate cottages - and died there in about 1937.

This, so far as I can establish it, is "the Gwyddelwern connection" which my father appears to have misunderstood and which for so long puzzled me in my own researches.

Next: Clement & Mary Eleanor Jones