Hello! Been 10years since someone posted about John Vaughan! He is my great great great grandfather...My great-great grandmother Ann Evans of Welshpool, nee Vaughan, in Llanaber, Barmouth c 1831 was it seems the oldest child of John Vaughan and Gwenifred Griffiths. She died in Welshpool/Forden c. 1913. I have a photo of her, with my mother's oldest sister on her knee, with her daughter and granddaughter (my maternal grandmother)..FOUR generations taken in 1912...They had gone to Welshpool to show off what was Ann's first great grandchild and her daughter's first grandchild....I had seen a copy of this photo as a kid but it got lost..I saw it again, only a few years ago, along with a lot of family photos, all thanks to new found family on Ancestry.com.
I think Ann would have gone in to service and travelled along the line towards Shrewsbury to work, settling in Welshpool where she married Evan Evans...She was listed as a Welsh speaker as opposed to her sadly anglicised husband....Her children did have some knowledge of the language which became less and less by the time my grandmother and her siblings were born as they were brought up in Liverpool..Was always told Ann had worked in Powis Castle, which is in Welshpool, at some point..She had a long life and ended her days with her widowed son and his sons. She had had him aged 44. He too was an Evan Evans and had a confectioners shop in Welshpool..A few years earlier she had kept a boarding house in Welshpool, with such exotic residents as a Russian gent... My family maintained very strong ties to Welshpool for many years. Her daughter Elizabeth married my maternal great grandfather John Price who was also born in Welshpool but they did raise their large family over in Liverpool where they both died in 1929 ands 1946.
Ann, of whom I also have a large head and shoulders portrait as a middle aged woman, on the wall of the room I am in just now, was one of two gggrandmothers of whom I did NOT know her maiden name until last week ...I have a very clever new found DNA cousin in the US who found out such for me..We knew we were closely related and I had hoped it was through the other gggrandmother from Ireland, whose name I also did not have...Seems was through Ann after all....