- source: Family History Library Catalog
- the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia
Brawdy (Welsh: Breudeth) is a village and parish and community in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The Welsh language name appears to be an archaic form of "Bridget" and the parish may originally have been "Llanfreudeth". The English name is a corruption of the Welsh.
Brawdy is situated at the northeast corner of St. Brides Bay. The southern half of the parish is in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. The parish has 4 km of coastline accessible throughout by the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.
The parish includes the villages of Penycwm and Newgale (Welsh: Niwgwl), and the hamlets of Eweston (Welsh: Treŵen), Tancredston (Welsh: Trebwrnallt) and Trefgarn Owen. The parish church of St. David is a Grade II* listed building.
Together with the parishes of Llandeloy and Llanrheithan, it constitutes the community of Brawdy, which had a census population of 611 in 2001, increasing to 1,012 at the 2011 census. With the community of Solva, it makes up the Pembrokeshire ward of Solva.
The parish had an area of 2240 hectares. Its census populations were: 572 (1801): 753 (1851): 467 (1901): 425 (1951): 798 (1981, of which around 400 were military). The percentage of Welsh speakers was 88% (1891): 72% (1931): 36% (1971). The Pembrokeshire language frontier, known as the Landsker Line, corresponds roughly with the southern boundary of the parish, and it has historically been more Welsh-speaking (excluding military personnel from the Royal Signals Regiment who were based in the former Royal Navy and Royal Air Force Station). This is less so today, the 2011 census showed 19.1% of the population could speak Welsh, a fall from 32.2% in 2001.
During the second half of the 20th century, Brawdy was home to a large Fleet Air Arm, later an RAF Station and Army Barracks.
Research Tips
- A 1900 Ordnance Survey map of the historic county of Pembrokeshire is available on the A Vision of Britain through Time website. This shows all the old parishes within their urban and rural districts. Large farms and estates are also marked. On the Haverfordwest Rural District page there is a sketchmap indicating the civil parishes of Haverfordwest Rural District as of 1935.
- Pembrokeshire Archives has a website with a list of their holdings, as well as historical notes on places in Pembrokeshire. Its address is Prendergast, Haverfordwest, SA61 2PE; Tel No: 01437 775456 or (+44)1437 775456 (out of UK), E-mail: record.office@pembrokeshire.gov.uk
- GENUKI has a page on each of the old counties of Wales and, under these counties, pages for each of the ecclesiastical parishes within the county. Information is gathered under a number of headings and the amount of information varies from parish to parish. Parish descriptions are based on a gazetteer dated 1835 and thus the emphasis is on ecclesiastical parishes. (Civil parishes were not yet established.) The submitter is very firm about his copyright. This should not stop anyone from reading the material.
- The GENUKI Pembrokeshire pages include, under Description and Travel close to the bottom of the page, a link "parish map" to a map website showing boundaries and settlements before 1850. On the linked page will be maps of several parishes located close to each other.
- GENUKI also provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area, but there is no guarantee that the website has been kept up to date for every county.
- FreeBMD provides a link to a list of the civil registration districts for each Welsh county from 1837 to 1996. Civil registration districts changed with varying densities of population and improvements in communication. Most counties and unitary authorities now have only one district. The list helps with providing names for the registration districts listed in the FreeBMD index and also as a guide for where to look for census entries.
- The FamilySearch Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI and these have been prepared at a later date. The Wiki may look like Wikipedia but the information has been provided for family historians. There are tables of links between the parishes in the historic counties of Wales and their post-1996 counterparts. This is the only genealogical website found that provides this information universally; others are not as thorough.
- Some words in Welsh come up time and time again and you may want to know what they mean or how to pronounce them. For example,
"Eglwys" is a church and the prefix "Llan" is a parish.
"w" and "y" are used as vowels in Welsh.
"Ll" is pronounced either "cl" or "hl" or somewhere in between. "dd" sounds like "th".
The single letter "Y" is "the" and "Yn" means "in".
"uwch" means "above"; "isod" is "below" or "under";
"gwch" is "great", "ychydig" is "little";
"cwm" is a "valley".
- In both Welsh and English all these words are commonly used in place names in the UK. Place names are often hyphenated, or two words are combined into one. Entering your problem phrase into Google Search, including the term "meaning in Welsh", will lead you to Google's quick translation guide. I'm no authority; these are just things I have picked up while building up this gazetteer for WeRelate.
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