Families of The Valleys

Families seated in The Valleys

• JonesSon of John, and roughly one in twenty Welsh-descended people in the world.
• MorganThe name that named a kingdom, Morgannwg's enduring patronym.
• Bevanab Evan, the contracted patronymic that built the National Health Service.
• Priceap Rhys, the Welsh contraction working on the name of a king.
• RichardsSon of Richard, the -s patronymic that crossed the Marches.

Historic ties to The Valleys

Families with historic but not core ground here.

• Williams
• Davies
• Evans
• Thomas
• Roberts
• Lewis
• Hughes
• Edwards
• Powell
• Rees
• House of Herbert
• Watkins

Champions made here

Famous bearers whose lives or work root in The Valleys.

• Richard LlewellynThe author of How Green Was My Valley, the south Wales coal-valley novel that became the foundational popular fiction of Welsh national identity, sold seven million copies, and won the 1942 Best Picture Oscar in John Ford's adaptation.
• Dame Siân PhillipsThe Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen miner's daughter whose Welsh was her first language, took RADA at seventeen, played Livia in the BBC's I, Claudius as a landmark of British classical television, and ran a sixty-five-year English-language and Welsh-language acting career.
• Donald DaviesThe Treorchy-born physicist who in 1965 at the National Physical Laboratory invented packet switching, the message-chopping principle on which every packet of internet traffic in the world has travelled ever since.
• Aneurin BevanThe Tredegar collier's son who left the colliery face at thirteen and on the fifth of July 1948 brought into being the National Health Service, the largest single act of social provision in British history.
• Leighton ReesThe Ynysybwl furniture salesman who in February 1978 at the Heart of the Midlands nightclub in Nottingham took the inaugural British Darts Organisation World Professional Darts Championship, the founding moment of professional televised darts as a major British sporting event.