Powered By Blogger

Sunday, October 22, 2017

Remembering the Pritchard Family


Grave 10 of Plot 09N-12-01 at the Sutton Cemetery has a stone inscribed, “GWLADYS PRITCHARD JONES” with the dates “1883-1928”.

Should you have noticed that stone, I’m guessing that among your first thoughts was something along the lines of, “How did a monument carver make such a typo with his chisel?”

Misspelled? Or was this woman's name actually G(w)ladys?
The volunteer who created the findagrave.com memorial for this person likely took a few minutes before stepping up to correct the mistake. The memorial lists the lady as “Gladys Pritchard Jones”.

I vaguely remember noticing the name four years ago while I was photographing Sutton Cemetery gravestones as a volunteer for findagrave.com at a time when fewer than 25% of the cemetery had been photographed for that robust website. But I was trucking right along with the project and did not investigate that grave inscription.

We uncover many mysteries, big and small, and some get passed over or forgotten while we are working with stories about the Sutton community. But sometimes a situation falls into our laps driving us back to a mystery.

This 20" X 30" framed needlepoint triggered our
interest in the David Pritchard family, early settlers
near Sutton.
Such a situation was in a recent email from the senior curator at the Nebraska State Historical Society who offered to transfer a framed needlepoint to the Sutton Museum. The item came from the estate of Miss Maude Pritchard of Sutton in 1956, given in memory of David and Mary Ann Pritchard of Sutton.

I was familiar with the Pritchard family; they were once near-neighbors. We accepted the curator’s offer, retrieved the item from the state museum and it is now part of our Sutton collection.

The item deserved proper documentation so we immediately delved into the story.

My recollection from about 1950 was that three people lived on the Prichard farm, one mile west on the DLD and a quarter-mile north, west side, and that two of them were blind. I knew I could check with the Answer Ladies who sit at the back table on our Pancake Saturdays. Sallie Barbee straightened me out – there were only two people there and both were blind. She remembers her family stopping to check on the Pritchard’s.

Sallie believes her family did errands for the Prichard’s. I think we, and others probably did too.

Brother and sister Bertram and Maude Pritchard were the two blind residents. Bertram died in 1950, Maude in 1955, fitting the 1956 date for the gift of the needlepoint to the museum in Lincoln.

David and Mary Ann (Davies) Pritchard immigrated from Wales in 1888 with five children: John David, age 17; Maude was 13; Bertram, 8; William Davies Pritchard was about 8 and may have been Bertram’s twin and the baby of the family was Gwladys, age 5.

The family left census records, marriage records and other traces where they sometimes identified their origin as Wales and other times as England. They likely saw Wales as part of England, or at least a lesser part of the United Kingdom.

Although the younger daughter was sometimes called Gladys, formal documents, her 1908 Lancaster County marriage license and her tombstone included the “w” in Gwladys. What kind of a name is that? What kind of a word?

Have you ever looked at a map of Wales?

The Welsh do some particularly peculiar things when assembling letters into words.

The Pritchard family came from Breconshire in Wales. The -shire suffix refers to an area that corresponds to our counties. But it’s squishy. The Brits have occasionally merged counties, changed boundaries and changed names of counties as recently as 1965 and 1974. And they have different kinds of counties. It’s complicated.

But back to Welsh names.

Penkelly Castle near the boyhood home of David Pritchard.
David was born in Penkelly also called Pencelli. Mary Ann was born in Beaufort, which is near where Sir Thomas John Woodward grew up before he changed his name to Tom Jones, perhaps the only Welshman many know of.

The Pritchard offspring were born in the tiny village of Bedwellty.

The village of Bedwellty in Monmouthshire, Wales. Ever been to a pub in the UK?
You'd love it. There is nothing like it in the U.S. They are not bars, or snack shops,
or restaurants, or coffee shops or donut shops but they do all of those things better
and all in one place, early morning to late at night. 
These are not unusual names, but in the surrounding area you find Ebbw Vale, Cwnbran, Ynysybwl, Mynydd Eglwysilan, Troedrhiwfuwch and the shire’s largest town, Ystradgynlais. It is our good fortune that the Welsh were not predominate in settling the New World.

More to our point, there are towns called Capel Gwynfe, Gelin gwm Uchaf, Gwernesney and Gwyddgrug and a mountain called Gwaun Rhudd. Now the Pritchard girl’s name of Gwladys makes more sense.
 
The Welsh have more fun than most when collecting letters to create their words. Perhaps the Welsh
language is nothing more than a huge joke they play on the rest of the world.
But where did the name come from?

Saint Gwladys ferch Brychan was the queen of the saint-king Gwynllyw Milwr. Saint Gwladys died in the year 500, or maybe 523. Her feast day is the 29th of March.

So, the name Gwladys Pritchard Jones in the Sutton Cemetery is no misprint.

John, Maude and Bertram never married and lived out their lives on the N ½ of the SE ¼ of Section 33-8-5.  Leonard Johnson farmed and purchased the 80. It was part of the 400+ acres that were sold at auction by the Douglas family a few years ago.

The Pritchard farm, show here belonging to Mary, was a mile west of the park corner
and the second 80 to the north.. The C. Johnson farm to the north was that of Charley
Johnson, my great, grandfather. That quarter passed to his son Albert and in turn to
his son Leonard. F. Johnson was Charley's son Fred; that farm later to Clarence Johnson
and is still in the Johnson family, farmed by the Jasnochs. 
William Davies Pritchard left Sutton and was married to Katherine Frantz in Denver in May 1918. Later that year he filed his WWI draft registration and noted that he had a physically disqualifying condition, stating “has lost one eye”. As Bertram and Maude were later blind, the family may have had some genetically connected eye disorder. William died in 1964. He is the only family member not buried in Sutton Cemetery.

Daughter Gwladys married Harry Jones in Lincoln on the last day of 1908. She died in 1928. Neither William or Gwladys had children.

We’ve told about the demographics of Sutton often during the lifetime of the historical society, telling of Germans, Germans from Russia, Swedes and Danes, the Irish and even a few Scots. Many of the U. S. residents who settled in this area were from “back East” – Iowa, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, etc. but with deeper roots from England. I’m not sure we’ve mentioned the Welsh before.

When we speak of the United Kingdom, the U.K., we usually think of England, Ireland (at least Northern Ireland), Scotland and ... finally Wales. The history of Wales was closely blended into the history of England early to the point that they tend to lack a distinctive story.

Well, we hope that the story of the Pritchard family adds a tiny sliver of proud Welsh history to the Sutton story.

We do not know of a second Welsh family in Sutton's story, but the Pritchard family
does connect the name of a Sutton Welsh girl with a Queen, and a Saint.
Another thing the Pritchard story does is illustrate how a single artifact or a single piece of information often offers a clue to a little piece of Sutton history. That clue may have been laying around for a long time. Old newspapers, an item on a census from 100 years ago, scrapbooks, letters and other attic treasures, or even an unusual spelling on a tombstone can lead to new knowledge and understanding of our vague or forgotten collective memory.

Our museum has become the depository for literally hundreds of Sutton artifacts and clues that could unravel vague and forgotten memories. Les Bauer’s collection of WWII photos, journal entries and letters that we wrote about last month is an example. Paintings by the Ebert sisters and their art students likely are clues to people and events. Military uniforms, old photos, family histories, the Sutton depot cart, our incubator and other artifacts have interesting and important stories to tell, if someone just takes a bit of time and effort to delve in. It takes little more than a healthy dose of curiosity.

We’ve made this pitch several times. The success of the Sutton Museum will very soon hang on our success in attracting a new people to step forward and join us, the sooner the better. We’re calling on your curiosity this time.

There are many things about the Sutton story that are not known today, in mid-2017, but they are knowable. It just takes someone with a bit of curiosity and resourcefulness. It need not take much time or heavy lifting. Most of the research for the story of the Pritchard family was done online and in a few hours (not counting some real interesting distractions that popped up in the process.) The always-handy Sutton High Alumni Directory told us that Maude was the only Pritchard grad, Class of 1893.

The online resources were findagrave.com (free), Google searches (free) Google Earth (free), ancestry.com (subscription needed, but there are similar and adequate free sites), census records (available on ancestry.com plus other sites, some free – and that’s about it.

Essentially the only information we found that relied on collective memories was that Bertram and Maude were blind and that the family had lived on that 80. Otherwise, the information was sitting there waiting to be found.

The Pritchard family of seven immigrated in 1888 leaving family and friends in Wales. We don’t know how long or often they corresponded with those people. The family lived out their lives, only two of them ever leaving Sutton, had no offspring to remember them. They died and were slowly forgotten.

The Pritchard name survives in a major family plot in the Cemetery, on plat maps and land records, in one line in the school directory and possibly a few mentions in old newspapers. Probably the only physical item from the Pritchard family is the framed needlework now in the Sutton Museum. And there is this article, the product of a few hours research.

How difficult is it to conduct this kind of research? It can be difficult, the first time. It can be tricky the second and third time, but the time and effort from beginner to journeyman doesn’t take long.

Want to have some fun and satisfy your curiosity? Just say “Hi!”

This article first appeared in the September 2017 issue of Sutton Life Magazine.



No comments: