Place:Caron is Clawdd, Cardiganshire, Wales

Watchers
NameCaron is Clawdd
Alt namesTregaronsource: town/village in parish
Argoed and Ystradsource: township in parish
Berwynsource: township in parish
Blaenaeronsource: township in parish
Blaencaronsource: township in parish
Croessource: township in parish
Trecefelsource: township in parish
Treflynsource: township in parish
Ystradsource: township in parish
Llechwedd Y Cwnsource: hamlet in parish
Rhandir Gwilymsource: hamlet in parish
Rhiw Sonsource: hamlet in parish
Rhuddlan Isafsource: hamlet in parish
TypeParish (ancient), Civil parish
Coordinates52.217°N 3.917°W
Located inCardiganshire, Wales     ( - 1974)
Also located inDyfed, Wales     (1974 - 1996)
Ceredigion, Wales     (1996 - )
See alsoTregaron Rural, Cardiganshire, Walesrural district 1894-1974
source: Family History Library Catalog
source: Family History Library Catalog


Caron is Clawdd is a community (or civil parish) now in the county of Ceredigion, Wales, but before 1974 in the historic county of Cardiganshire. It has always been very thinly populated. Its largest settlement is Tregaron (see below).

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Caron is Clawdd from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"CARON-YS-CLAWDD, a parish in Tregaron [registration] district, Cardigan[shire]; on the Sarn Helen way and the rivers Berwyn and Teifi, at Tregaron [railway] station, and 18½ miles NNW of Llandovery. It is called also Caron, Tregaron, and Trefgaron; and it contains the townships of Caron-Uwch-Clawdd, Blaen-Aeron, Tre-Cefel, BlaenCaron, Tref-Lynn, Croes and Berwyn, and Argoed and Ystrad, the last of which includes the town of Tregaron, with a post office under Carmarthen. Acres: 39,138. Real property: £4,056. Population: 2,608. Houses: 567. Much of the surface is bog and mountain. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of St. Davids. Value: £156. Patron: the Bishop of St. Davids. The church has a good tower; and the churchyard contains some ancient monumental stones. There is a Calvinistic Methodist chapel. Twm Shon Catti, the famous robber of the 17th century, who afterwards became high sheriff of the county, was a native."

Caron uwch Clawdd is listed as a township of Caron is Clawdd in 1870 but it became a separate parish befor 1900 and is listed separately in WeRelate.

Tregaron

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Tregaron is a market town in the county of Ceredigion, Wales, but before 1974 in the historic county of Cardiganshire. It lies on the River Brenig (also Brennig), a tributary of the River Teifi. According to the 2011 UK census, the population of the ward of Tregaron was 1,213 and 67% of the population could speak Welsh.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Tregaron.

"TREGARON, a small town, a parish, a [registration] sub-district, and a [registration] district, in Cardigan[shire]. The town stands on the Manchester and Milford railway, 10 miles NE by N of Lampeter; was anciently a borough, disfranchised in 1730; is now a polling place; and has a post-office under Carmarthen, a [railway] station, a church, a Calvinistic Methodist chapel, and fairs on 16 March and 8 Oct. Population: about 800."

(Source: A Vision of Britain through Time)

Research Tips

  • A 1900 Ordnance Survey map of the historic county of Cardiganshire 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.
  • GENUKI online parish map from the CD of Historic Parishes of England and Wales: an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata [computer file]. (Kain, R.J.P., Oliver, R.R.). (Extracted by Gareth Hicks). This is a much clearer map that the one referenced above.
  • Ceredigion Archives has a website with a list of their holdings, as well as historical notes on places in Cardiganshire.
  • 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.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Tregaron. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.