Place:St. Dogmaels, Pembrokeshire, Wales

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

St Dogmaels (Welsh: Llandudoch) is a village, parish and community in Pembrokeshire, Wales, on the estuary of the River Teifi, a mile downstream from the town of Cardigan, now in neighbouring Ceredigion principal area. A little to the west of the village, further along the estuary, lies Poppit Sands beach.

The English and Welsh names seem to bear no similarity, but it has been suggested that possibly both names refer to the same saint or founder, with mael ("prince") and tud ("land or people of") being added to Dog/doch as in Dog mael and Tud doch.

The village contains the remains of a 12th-century Tironian abbey, which was in its day one of the richer monastic institutions in Wales. Adjacent to the abbey ruins lies the Anglican St. Thomas parish church, which appears successively to have occupied at least three sites close to or within the abbey buildings. The present building is a respectable minor Victorian edifice and contains the Ogam Sagranus stone. St. Dogmael's was once a marcher borough. George Owen of Henllys, in 1603, described it as one of five Pembrokeshire boroughs overseen by a portreeve.

From 1894 until 1934 St. Dogmaels parish lay in the rural district of St. Dogmells and was named St. Dogmells Rural Parish. The excerpt from Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales below uses the same spelling. There is also another parish named St. Dogwells near Haverfordwest.

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

"DOGMELLS (St.), or Llandydoch, a suburb and a parish in the [registration] district of Cardigan, and county of Pembroke[shire]. The suburb lies on the river Teifi, separated only by that river from the town of Cardigan; is called Bridgend, but includes a village of the name of St. Dogmells; and has a post office of that name, under Cardigan. :"The parish contains also the hamlets of Cippin, Panty-groes, and Abbey, and the workhouse of Cardigan. Acres: 6,220; of which 235 are water. Real property: £5,642. Population: 2,438. Houses: 641. The Welsh princes had a seat here; and Rhys ap Tewdwr defeated here the sons of Codifor ab Collwyw. A large and splendid abbey was founded at what is now called Abbeybarn, by Martin de Tours; and some remains of the church, and of the eastern attached buildings, together with two curious antiquities in the grounds, still exist. The living is a vicarage, united with the vicarages of Llantyd and Monington, in the diocese of St. Davids. Value: £143. Patron: the Lord Chancellor. The church is a neat early English structure, adjacent to the remains of the abbey; and contains a monument of Bradshaw, who got the abbey at the dissolution. There is a dissenting chapel."

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.