Y Beible

    Where does one start when looking at your family.  The fact that a person is alive and reading this prose means that you have a very long chain of ancestors extending forever back in time.  Indeed, somewhere around 3 to 8 % of us have a Neanderthal ancestor and carry the genes to prove it. 

     That very fact begs the question :what about heaven?  If there is heaven, who would we choose to hang out with for eternity?  The Neanderthal Bubba who can hunt and kill a wooly mammoth or your shrill mother who never did anything particularly cool?

    One thing many families have is the proverbial "Family Bible", inside of which we can find, in faded spidery script, the threads of an incomplete genealogy.  Many family members are there, highlighted as people of renown, some family members were merely forgotten, while other family members were intentionally left off the roster.

    We all have "y dafad du" or the black sheep.  The forgotten one, never to be discussed in polite company.

    My mother's family, the Williams of Nova Scotia, certainly did have a thick family bible, pages of aging loose-leaf paper documenting various ancestors stuffed between the yellowing pages of a heavy tome.  I remember leafing through the book, trying to concentrate over the shrill demands of care for the ancient scripture, and wondering at the names of my maternal progenitors.

    The founding father was sidled with the name Zephaniah Williams. Nothing like a Biblical moniker to give one gravitas. He was an American turncoat left without anywhere to call home after the American Revolution was over.  Traitors can never go home.  He was unceremoniously deposited on the shores of Nova Scotia, marooned and barred from his American home.  There is a tiny settlement southeast of Antigonish, Nova Scotia that still bears his name.

    Either way, nearly 300 years later his family still remembers him.  That right there is his legacy.  Thankfully, none of us chose to stick his name on any of our kids.

    Of course, if you listen to the branch of the family referred to as the "White Williams", you might also hear that Zephaniah was a very friendly guy, which explains the black hair and olive skin the "Black Williams" branch still sports.  We don't mention it because that observation is fighting words and got a certain Reverend run right the hell out of town nearly a century back.

    On the other side of the family, the Fleming paternal line, I never had any idea that a family Bible existed.  To tell you the truth, once a person gets more than three generations back, to a gentleman named James Orr Fleming, there is scant evidence that Fleming is indeed our family name.  I'll come back to James Orr in his time.

    Things get a bit easier once you get to James' progeny, James Ramsey and William Ramsey.  We have military records and verifiable tales of the lads.  We have pictures.

    And we now have a Bible.

    A few months back my cousin Jesse reached out and said that he would like to pass on the family Bible to me.  At the time I had not spoken to Jesse in probably thirty or more years and my mind flashed back to the gangly teen-ager with the 60's style Beatles hair cut that was my lasting memory.  The Bible was the scripture passed down from the Welsh Thomas clan, the family of my maternal grandmother Olive.

    I'm not sure anyone in my branch of the Fleming's knew such a thing existed.  

    Critically, I understood why Jesse passed the Bible to me.  Of all my family I think I am the only person who has made a valid attempt at learning Cymraeg (Welsh Celtic) and the entire book is written in Cymraeg.  The only English I can find in it are personal scripts added by family members.

    Further to that, yes, it is a huge responsibility.  A book that has been carried and treasured for over 150 years and now it is in my hands.  It's a bit scary actually....and now I am going to have to find someone in the next generation to protect it and pass it on.

    It's like finding a worthy ring-bearer. 

    It also comes with no shortage of mystery itself; mystery that is not tied up in a language barrier.  (By the way:  Cymraeg is possibly the most poetic language in the world. It was the inspiration for Tolkien's Elvish language. The National Eisteddfod is possibly the most demanding poetry competition in the world.  Cymru takes it's poetry very seriously) 

  

    Looking at the notes above, it seems that the importer of the Beibl was one "John Bevan" of Loughor, Wales, a small village north and west of Swansea (Abertawe).  John had quite a maudlin note in the family register to the effect that all that will be left of him when he dies is this note scribbled in the family Bible.

    Sometime after 1875, after John Bevan's arrival in Cedar District, just south of Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, the bible was passed onto Anne Thomas.

    So let's do a little thinking about that.  A Bible such as this: leather bound, originally sporting some brass latches and no less than 14 pounds of coarse grained paper, was likely bought for a substantial sum back in the 1870s, from a printer near Manchester/ Liverpool.

    John Bevan then transported this tome, all 14 pounds of it, across the Atlantic and presumably around the Horn to disembark at Nanaimo in the practically undeveloped wilds of Vancouver Island. Fourteen pounds of sacred paper, thousands of miles over the treacherous Atlantic and through some of the most dangerous waters at the bottom of South America.

    And then he gave it to Ann Thomas.

    

    I've looked around a bit.  I have no idea who John Bevan was and why did he pass on the Biblical brick?

    Then we come to John and Anne Thomas.

    They are the "Adam and Eve" of the Thomas clan, come from Wales and related to the Flemings of Vancouver through Olive, their daughter and my grandmother.

      The Thomas family were indeed salt of the earth types: hewers of wood, drawers of water and farmers.  Heroes and homebodies, refugees and colonists.

The list of the Thomas family. Of the names listed here, I only really recognize David, Gwendolyn, Ivor and Olive. David died before my time, but I personally met Gwendolyn, Ivor and Olive. 

    In this modern day, it has become very common to call our ancestors "colonists" or "colonizers", often said with a derogatory sneer, as if by condemning our progenitors somehow makes us less white or less complicit in the wholescale domination of North America by immigrants.

    I think most of us could do with a wee bit of education of where we came from.  

    The Thomas family came from Treherbert, which translates to "Herbert's town (tre or dre).  It was a small industrial hell northeast of Swansea (Abertawe in our native tongue).  Little more than a desolate company town surrounded by unstable mounds of coal slag, the byproduct of the dank holes the men of the town survived to pull coal out of the ground. 

    To drive the industrial revolution that has allowed all us descendants to live in the relative luxury we do now.  Our comfort has been paid for in their blood and bravery (to pick up and move to the other side of the planet)

    Staying in Treherbert meant slaving 12 hours a day in the hell that is a coal mine, constantly inhaling the dust that would kill us in our fifties (if we were lucky) of "black lung".  Our children would attend schools dressed in black uniforms since black was the only color that hid the ubiquitous coal dust that coated everything above ground.  Our homes were company row housing and all the village lived under the constant threat that the overhanging slag heaps could collapse upon us at any moment.

    Our ancestors were not colonists. They were bloody refugees, escaping sure death while slaving as little more than indentured servants of the mostly English (Saesneg) coal barons.

Treherbert circa 1816,compliments of Ivor Thomas, on leave from the front lines of WWI.  Traded one hell for another.

Ivor claims these girls, dressed in their school uniforms, were cousins.  The uniforms appear to be black: very practical in a town where everything would have had a layer of coal dust upon it.

    I currently live within two easy hours of Nanaimo and Cedar District, the settling ground of the Thomas clan.  I hope to find the time to investigate the family there and, who knows, I may bump into some long lost cousins nobody knows about.  Certainly there was no shortage of family from Ann and John.  Unfortunately I know I won't be finding any descendants of David, Gwendolyn, or Ivor since they all died without progeny.  I believe James died in infancy (there is a note by Anne to that effect).  It looks like two daughters, Francis and Catherine, remained behind in Treherbert when the family immigrated.

    That must have been a bitter parting.  I might research them someday, just to see if that leads anywhere.

    The majority of the notes in Y Beibl were in the beautiful copperplate script of Anne Thomas.  There are more than a few corrections in the notations which mar the effect, but Lord knows, if I could write with that beautiful flowing script I would write longwinded letters to everyone I know and many who I will never meet.

     The loss of cursive script is a terrible thing.  When one works that hard to write beautifully, they usually also write beautiful things.

    But then, here we are living in a world dominated by garbage like X (aka Twitter) and Facebook, home of ignorance and misinformation.  Who needs to write epic prose in flowing gothic copperplate script when you can make pithy comments attached to a mindless meme instead.

John Thomas, my great grandfather, father to Olive Fleming, nee Thomas 

Anne Thomas, queen of copperplate script.  The first time I saw this photo I was sure it was a very poorly preserved photo of Olive, my grandmother.  The apple fell just a few inches.