Place:Rosemarket, Pembrokeshire, Wales

Watchers
NameRosemarket
Alt namesRhosmarketsource: Family History Library Catalog
TypeParish (ancient), Civil parish
Coordinates51.74°N 5.01°W
Located inPembrokeshire, Wales     ( - 1974)
Also located inDyfed, Wales     (1974 - 1996)
Pembrokeshire (principal area), Wales     (1996 - )
See alsoHaverfordwest Rural, Pembrokeshire, Walesrural district 1894-1974
Preseli District, Dyfed, Walesdistrict municipality 1974-1996
source: Family History Library Catalog
the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Rosemarket is a village, parish and community in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The name does not refer to flowers but to the hundred of Roose or Rhos and the former Welsh cantref of Rhos. The community had a population of 613 in the UK census of 2011.

History

The village was a marcher borough founded by the Knights Hospitaller in the 12th century. In 1603 Owen, the Welsh antiquarian, described it as one of nine Pembrokeshire "boroughs in decay".

The parish church, like many in the former lands of Rhos, is dedicated to the 6th-century Breton prince and Welsh saint Ismael.

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of 8513 from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"ROSEMARKET, or Rhosmarket, a parish, with a village, in the [registration] district and county of Pembroke[shire]; 1 mile S E of Johnston [railway] station, and 4 N E of Milford. It has a post-office under Milford. Acres: 1,759. Real property: £1,319. Population: 451. Houses: 100. The property is divided among a few. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of St. Davids. Value: £96. Patron: the Lord Chancellor. The church was recently restored. Lucy Waters, the mother of the Duke of Monmouth, and Miss Williams, the blind protegée of Dr. Johnson, were natives."

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.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Rosemarket. 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.