Jones

Before the Tudors a Welshman carried no family name. He carried his ancestry. His baptismal name was linked by ap, or ab before a vowel, to his father's: Evan, son of Thomas, was Evan ap Thomas; Evan's son John was John ab Evan; John's son Rees was Rees ap John. A daughter was ferch, daughter of. Nothing was inherited. In 1292 forty-eight per cent of recorded Welsh names were patronymics, over seventy per cent in some parishes.

The chain did not stop at the father. Names like Llewelyn ap Dafydd ab Ieuan ap Gruffudd ap Meredydd were unremarkable, running back perhaps seven generations, a genealogy of the male line spoken aloud. Under Welsh law, standing and entitlement ran through descent from a common ancestor, so a man's name was the legal document he carried in his mouth. As that law decayed, so did the reason for the chain.

Fixed surnames were adopted in Wales from the 15th century onwards, and under Henry VIII they became hereditary among the gentry before spreading slowly to commoners. What settled it was paperwork. Around the Laws in Wales Acts of 1536 to 1543 English was the official language of the state, every official document had to be in English, and a clerk needed one fixed name per household, not a recital of grandfathers. So ap Siôn was written as Jones, ap Dafydd as Davies, ap Gwilym as Williams.

The Jones spelling already existed across the border, from Jone, a variant of John, plus the English genitive s; a Matilda Jones is on record as early as 1273. Welsh fathers named John were poured into a mould already cut. Not every ap vanished (Powell is ap Hywel, Price is ap Rhys, Pugh is ap Hugh, Bowen is ab Owen), and in remote parishes patronymics were still in use in the early 19th century.

The stock of Welsh surnames is small, and that is a consequence rather than an accident. The names were built from baptismal names, and after the Protestant Reformation the variety of baptismal names shrank. A narrow pool of first names, frozen across a country within a few generations, made a narrow pool of surnames: Evans, Jones, Williams, Davies and Thomas were all still in the top ten recorded in England and Wales in 2000.

For anyone tracing a line the consequence is blunt: two people named Jones, even in the same village, cannot be assumed to share an ancestor. Around 200,000 people in Wales carry the name, 5.75 per cent of the population, and about 450,000 in England. Jones is not a house or a clan. It is the signature of a nation being registered.

Industry concentrated the name. The population of Wales rose from 587,000 in 1801 to 2,421,000 by 1911, most of it in the coal districts. Carmarthenshire and the South Wales coalfield, drawing labour out of every parish in the country, became the densest Jones country on earth, and by the 1850s roughly a sixth of the Welsh population bore the name.

Census-takers in Merthyr Tydfil answered the problem by writing the trade into the name (Jones the Bread, Jones the Post, Jones the Coal) because there was no other way to tell one household from the next, and the convention survives in speech.

Two Joneses changed what the Welsh language could reach. In 1800 Mary Jones (1784 to 1864), sixteen years old and six years saving, walked twenty-six miles barefoot from her hill farm to Bala to buy a Welsh Bible from the Reverend Thomas Charles. What he did that afternoon led four years later to the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and within a generation to scripture printed in more than two hundred languages.

Michael Daniel Jones (1822 to 1898) of Llanuwchllyn watched the Welsh of Cincinnati lose the language within a generation. Principal of the Bala Independent College from 1855, he concluded from 1858 that Welsh needed ground of its own, and negotiated with the Argentine government for the Chubut Valley in Patagonia. The tea-clipper Mimosa left Liverpool on 25 May 1865 with a hundred and fifty-three settlers and landed on 28 July. He never sailed himself; he raised the money and kept the near-failing colony alive from the chapels of north Wales. Welsh has been spoken on the Chubut ever since.

Inigo Jones (1573 to 1652) gave England its classical vocabulary, above all in the Banqueting House on Whitehall, completed in 1622 and now the principal surviving fragment of the Palace of Whitehall. The name took land as well. Fonmon Castle in the Vale of Glamorgan is believed to have had only two owning families in its history: the St Johns from Norman times, and from 1656 the Parliamentarian Colonel Philip Jones and his descendants, who held it until 1917.

The name went out with the ships and the pit work, to Pennsylvania, to Jackson County in Ohio once called Little Wales, to the chapel cities of the diaspora. A study commissioned by the Welsh Government found 718,000 people in Wales, nearly 35 per cent, carrying a family name of Welsh origin, against 4.7 per cent in New Zealand, 4.1 per cent in Australia and 3.8 per cent in the United States: 16.3 million people across the countries studied. If your name is Jones you are in that number, and the reason is a clerk with an English form and a country that would not stop speaking Welsh.