Welsh Wills Online

From BBC News:

About 800,000 pages of documents, some going as far back as the 14th Century, have been placed on the National Library of Wales' website.

Among the wills available at the click of a button are Twm Sion Cati's, known as the Welsh Robin Hood, and hymn writer William Williams, Pantycelyn.

Officials said it had taken more than five years to digitise the documents.

The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth said the wills dated from the 14th Century until 1858, when civil probate was introduced, and 1,000 of them were written in Welsh.

Lost and Found

You know that phrase "it was there right under your nose all the time". I had one of those moments today.

I have been looking into the genealogy of King Harold II or more specifically, his father Wulfnoth, this week. I have managed to find out quite a bit about the ancestry of Wulfnoth - however, much was speculative and I didn't have the primary sources at hand which I needed to shed light on the matter. All roads came rather haltingly to a dead end, so to speak.

And then I checked my email. And what do you supposed I had sitting there in the Inbox for the past week, which I filled, unread, into a folder marked "Anglo Saxon Geneaology" - yep - Wulfnoth's pedigree.

One might be forgiven for thinking that my own "research" into this (which covered barely one week) was rather half-arsed. Well, maybe it was; and then again, maybe it wasn't.

Anglo-Saxon genealogy is a newish area for me - at least as far as creating a line of descent going back more than one or two generations. When dealing with my "medieval women" I have tended to focus on their immediate parentage to within, as I said, one or two generations back. Going back further, say eight or nine generations, was not something I had considered - it would, I felt, make their story too long in the telling.

So, there you have it - well, rather - I had it sitting there in front of me for the best part of a week.

I think my temporal lobe is on vacation .....