Place:Bridell, Pembrokeshire, Wales

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Bridell (Welsh: Y Bridell) is a hamlet and also a parish in Pembrokeshire, Wales, situated in the north of the county. The parish includes the village of Pen-y-bryn. Together with the parishes of Cilgerran and Llantwyd, it now constitutes the community of Cilgerran. Lying on the western border of the cantref of Emlyn, it has always been essentially Welsh-speaking.

The hamlet of Bridell is situated on the A478, 2.5 miles (4.0 km) south of Cardigan and consists of a few private houses, the church (St David's) and Plas Bridell Manor house, a 19th-century mansion.

The parish area was estimated at 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) in 1844 with a population of 404. Official census figures were: 248 (1801): 335 (1851): 237 (1901): 220 (1951): 221 (1981) with the proportion of Welsh speakers 94% (1891), 90% (1931) and 51% (1971).

In 1890, local clergy were reported to be in "great distress" through the failure to collect tithes amounting to £1,738 over six parishes, with Bridell parish owed £249; previous attempts at recovery had been "crushed by riotous crowds".

Pen-y-bryn Village

Pen-y-Bryn (English meaning: "top of the hill"), also referred to as Penybryn, is a small village situated on the northern side of the parish at a crossroads which is the location of the Penybryn Baptist Chapel, established in 1818.

The village has outgrown the hamlet of Bridell owing to a building surge in the latter part of the 20th century driven both by local need and by immigration from other parts of Wales and the UK.

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 Cemais Rural District page there is a sketchmap indicating the civil parishes of Cemais Rural District as of 1935. Cemais was a rural district formed in 1934 from the earlier Llanfyrnach and St. Dogmells Rural Districts.
• 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.