Families of Sir Gâr
Carmarthenshire
Dinefwr Castle, Carmarthen and the Tywi, Lord Rhys's capital country.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Sir Gâr
- JonesSon of John, and roughly one in twenty Welsh-descended people in the world.
- DaviesSon of David, born of the patron saint's name and densest in his own corner of Wales.
- ThomasThe fifth Welsh surname, son of Thomas, on the same Tudor-era road as Jones and Williams.
- ReesFrom Rhys, the name of the most consequential prince of 12th-century Wales.
- RichardsSon of Richard, the -s patronymic that crossed the Marches.
- GriffithsSon of the strong lord, the patronymic of Llywelyn the Last.
- HowellsSon of Hywel the Good, the surname of the great Welsh law-king.
- BowenSon of Owen, the patronymic of the great Welsh princely name.
- House of DinefwrRoyal house of Deheubarth, the Lord Rhys.
Historic ties to Sir Gâr
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Sir Gâr.
- Hywel DdaThe tenth-century King of Deheubarth and effective overlord of most of Wales who at the synod of Whitland around 945 codified the laws of Wales, the legal system that governed the country in its native form for the next two and a half centuries until the Edwardian conquest of 1282.
- Rhys PritchardThe Vicar of Llandovery whose Welsh-language verse-tracts on the Christian moral life, posthumously gathered as Canwyll y Cymry (The Welshmen's Candle) in 1646, ran through over fifty editions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were the most-printed Welsh-language book before the Welsh Bible.
- The Lord RhysThe Prince of Deheubarth whose forty-two-year reign from 1155 to 1197 held the southern half of Wales against the Norman advance, won the formal recognition of Henry II at the Council of Gloucester in 1175, and in 1176 hosted at Cardigan Castle the first recorded eisteddfod, the founding event of the Welsh bardic tradition.