Place:Presteign, Radnorshire, Wales

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Presteign (Welsh: Llanandras, "the church of St. Andrew") is a town and community in now in Powys, Wales. Before 1974 it was the county town of the historic county of Radnorshire. According the the UK census of 2011, Presteigne has a population of 2,710.

The town sits on the south bank of the River Lugg, which forms the England–Wales border as it passes the town — the border effectively wraps around the town's north, east and south sides. Nearby towns are Kington in Herefordshire to the south and Knighton in Radnorshireto the north, and surrounding villages include Norton and Stapleton, both in Herefordshire. The town falls within the Diocese of Hereford.

Before 1866 part of the parish was considered to be in Herefordshire, England.

History

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Presteigne.

Research Tips

• A 1900 Ordnance Survey map of the historic county of Radnorshire 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 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.