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- source: Family History Library Catalog
- the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia
St. Ishmaels or St. Ishmael's (Welsh: Llanismel) is a village, parish and community close to the harbour of Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The community comprises most of the parish of St. Ishmaels and had a population of 490 at the 2001 UK census. The electoral ward (for Pembrokeshire (principal area)) includes the communities of Herbrandston, Dale and Marloes and St. Brides. The community was subsequently merged with other communities and only the ward remained with the name St Ishmael's. This covers the entire peninsula with at total population at the 2011 census of 1,405.
The parish church of the local Saint Ismael is outside the village, hidden in a small valley near The Haven (another modern community). In the Age of the Saints, it may have been the seat of the bishop of the cantref of Rhos. With the name Llanismael, it was considered one of the principal dioceses of Dyfed under medieval Welsh law, second only to Menevia (modern St. David's). With the Norman conquest, St. Ishmaels became part of the Lordship of Haverfordwest. The church is a grade II listed building.
The south, west and east of the parish is bordered by the Milford Haven estuary with numerous important bird and marine life within the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. The north boundary is mainly farmland used for both grazing and arable.
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.
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