• Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to secondary sidebar

New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Adirondacks & NNY
  • Capital-Saratoga
  • Mohawk Valley
  • Hudson Valley & Catskills
  • NYC & Long Island
  • Western NY
  • History
  • Nature & Environment
  • Arts & Culture
  • Outdoor Recreation
  • Food & Farms
  • Subscribe
  • Support
  • Submit
  • About
  • New Books
  • Events
  • Podcasts

A Welsh Immigrant Writes Home from Upstate New York, 1856

December 15, 2021 by Daniel Koch 1 Comment

“Welsh Settlement in Upstate New York, 1795 to c. 1940s,”There is a fascinating letter from Evan Evans of Turin, Lewis County, NY to his relatives back in Wales. It is written in Welsh and dated August 1856.

The letter tells the story of a young man who had recently arrived in the United States who was struggling with homesickness and wrestling with doubts about whether he had made the right decision to move to America. He describes the sea-crossing, his arrival, and his new life in north-central New York State.

The letter now resides in the Meirionnydd Archives in northwest Wales.

It has been scanned and can be viewed on the Casgliad y Werin Cymru (People’s Collection Wales) website. In English translation for the first time (with thanks to Gwerfyl Price, a Welsh native speaker), it reads:

August 56

My dear Uncle,

I am sending you only a few words to greet you in the hope that they find you in your usual good health. I had a bad bout of sea sickness and was quite ill with it for about 9 or 10 days and am still not feeling as well as I was when I was [there]. However, I hope that I will feel better after becoming accustomed to the country.

The weather was very hot when we got here but has cooled slightly at present. From what I can see the land around is quite desolate and rather awful to my eyes, but things will hopefully improve with time.

I am working with Welsh people. The man [husband] is from Denbighshire and his wife from Llanbrynmair, and I am earning £2.14d a month in wages. I am around 12 miles distant from my brother. There are no Welsh chapels near to me […] I have the heaviest longing (‘hiraeth’) thus far and am thinking seriously about returning. I am thinking a lot about John at home as they were at harvest time, not even having time to wipe the sweat [from their brows], much as it is here. There will be a more detailed account of the voyage in John’s letter to my Uncle Lewis with whom I am sending this.

I sent two papers after disembarking in New York to show that I am alive. Remember me fondly to the family at Perth-y-felin, Tŷmol, Frongoch and Hendre. And fondest regards to you also, to John and Jane his wife, and to Beti, Robert, Gwen and little Jane. A million wishes to you all and to all of my old acquaintances, each and every one, and to Evan yr Allt Ddu. I would love to receive a letter from you also at your very earliest convenience. You should address the letter thus:

Evan Evans, Care of: John J. Jones, Turin, Lewis County, New York, America.

Letter from Evan Evans, New York, to his Uncle in Dinas Mawddy, Wales,Some Background

Immigration from Wales to the United States peaked in the late 1840s and 1850s as Wales, like Ireland, experienced economic hardship and crop failures that prompted many to seek better lives elsewhere.

As David Maldwyn Ellis explained in his 1972 article, “The Assimilation of the Welsh in Central New York” in the journal New York History, the Welsh community in Oneida County (which spilled over into Lewis and other neighboring counties) was one of the largest and most important in America.

The Welsh-language newspaper Y Drych was published in Utica, Oneida County, and ran well into the twentieth century. Welsh immigrants normally spoke Welsh as their first language. Partly due to their Protestantism, they were more readily accepted in America at the time than predominantly-Catholic immigrants from Ireland.

On finding Evan Evans’s letter, I immediately suspected that it was written by my third great-grandfather, Evan W. Evans. He lived in West Turin at the time of the 1860 Census and later married Ellen Griffiths of Turin. Ellen was also born in Wales and had immigrated with her parents as an eight-year-old girl in 1848. In 1860, the census recorded that Evan was a farm laborer who boarded in the home of a Scottish-born man named Francis Johnson.

Turin was a small village of about 1,800 at the time (its population is even smaller now), but given the nature of Welsh names, and their prevalence in this part of New York, all matches need to be treated extremely carefully.

In the 1860 Census, there were 22 men by the name of Evan Evans living in Oneida County and five Evan Evanses in Lewis County, all of whom lived in Turin or West Turin. Two of them were of the right approximate age to be the author of the letter. One was my third great-grandfather, who was 30. The other was a younger man – aged 23 – who also worked as a farm laborer and lived on the farm of Sylvester Foster, an elderly Connecticut-born man.

I believe it was the younger Evan Evans who wrote the letter primarily because of a fact recorded forty years later, in the 1900 Census. Both Evan Evanses were still alive at the time and (for the first time) the census lists of that year record the year of immigration for foreign-born residents. My third great-grandfather’s immigration date is cited as 1852. As the letter was written in 1856 and seems to have been written very soon after the sea-journey and arrival of its author, I believe it is unlikely to be his.

Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to confirm that it was by the younger Evan Evans either, as the year of his immigration is not recorded legibly in the 1900 Census. There is, however, a record of an Evan Evans, farmer, of the right age arriving in New York on board the ship John Bright from Liverpool (the departure point of most Welsh emigrants) on July 7, 1856. A John Evans a year older that him, possibly the brother mentioned in the letter, was on board the same ship.

It is reasonable to assume that the younger Evan Evans boarded at the home of John Jones (a Welsh immigrant himself who appears in the census as a tailor) initially before moving to the farm of Sylvester Foster sometime between writing the letter and the 1860 Census. This Evan Evans was drafted into the Union Army in the Civil War in 1863. He returned to Turin after the war and married a woman called Elizabeth, whereas my great-great grandfather moved south with his wife to start his own farm in the Town of Floyd in Oneida County in the Welsh village of Camroden.

What is fascinating about Evan Evans’s letter is the longing for home that it captures. After a tumultuous journey to America, his thoughts were full of the family and friends he had left behind. It also depicts the way in which immigrants started their new lives after arrival. The author boarded with a fellow Welshman. From there (like the Evan Evans who is my ancestor), he was able to procure work as a farmhand and, eventually, to set up a farm of his own.

The Welsh of Upstate New York assimilated over several generations. Like other immigrant groups, they eventually lost their language, and the American-born children or grandchildren of immigrants began to marry outside the Welsh community. But New York still has numerous Welsh-American societies.

Utica has hosted the North American Festival of Wales multiple times, most recently in September 2021, and Welsh-language singing still takes place at the annual Barn Festival in Remsen, Oneida County – about 25 miles from where Evan Evans wrote his doleful letter home in 1856.

It is a rarely preserved and poignant example of the emotional hardships that nearly all immigrants to America will have experienced as they began new lives thousands of miles from home.

Illustrations, from above: map of Welsh Settlement in Upstate New York, 1795 to c. 1940s courtesy Barbara Henry; and letter from Evan Evans, New York, to his Uncle in Dinas Mawddy, Wales, August 1856 courtesy Meirionnydd Archives, Gwynedd Archives Service.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Filed Under: Adirondacks & NNY, History, Mohawk Valley, Western NY Tagged With: Cultural History, Genealogy, Immigration, Lewis County, Oneida County, Turin, Utica, Welsh Immigrants

About Daniel Koch

Daniel Koch writes about American History. He completed a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford and is the author of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe: Class, Race and Revolution in the Making of an American Thinker (Bloomsbury, London, 2012). He is working on a new book about the history of New York State. Visit his website at https://www.danielkoch-history.com/.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ted Engle says

    December 20, 2021 at 6:23 PM

    Very interesting. I have ancestors who came to Turin (just above on Welch Hill or Gomer Hill) in 1848. My great, great, great grandfather John A Jones died in 1852 and is buried in the Welch Hill Cemetery (they spelled it that way back then). There is also a cemetery in town. The older Yankee immigrants lived in the lowlands and the Welsh and Irish had settlements in the hills above. John’s son Abraham likewise was in the Civil War and after the war went to Rome NY 30 miles to the South. Those farms were pretty rough and difficult to earn a living and Abraham got in the building trades after the war. The Rome Welsh church always shared the pastor with the Camroden church (yoked) and Abrahan married the daughter of a Welsh immigrant farmer named Thomas Andrews from Camroden. They eventually moved to Rome NY which is 5 miles South of Camroden and about 15 miles West of Utica. I still live in Rome and have ancestors in the Turin cemetery and the Wright Settlement cemetery. In the Welch Hill cemetery they are Williams and Jones) (In Wright Settlement they are Jones, Andrews, Hughes and Roberts)
    If you like I can drive you around the various cemeteries in the area during your next visit. I also am on the St David’s Society executive committee and involved with the planning of the song fests (Gymanfa Ganu) and the recent national festival. I also am a correspondent for the North American Welsh newspaper NINNAU.
    You can read about the local society on the web page http://www.saintdavidssociety.org Covid 19 has curtailed our activities but there are many, many Welsh activities in our area as the newsletters on the web site indicate.
    It was great to review your letter. Turin and Camroden are pretty small. My ancestors and yours undoubtedly were neighbors and attended church together. It’s a small world.

    Ted

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Help Finish Our 2022 Fundraising

Subscribe to New York Almanack

Subscribe! Follow the New York Almanack each day via E-mail, RSS, Twitter or Facebook updates.

Recent Comments

  • GARY SCHOEN on Moose Are Back in New York State: A Population Update
  • Deb Heller on Catskills Resort History: The Beginning of the End
  • John Warren on Civil War in the Mohawk Valley: The Battle of Oriskany
  • Richard Daly on Poetry: Mention It, Don’t Insist
  • Norma Coney on Civil War in the Mohawk Valley: The Battle of Oriskany
  • David Forest on Knapp’s Folly: Sullivan County’s Columbia Hotel
  • John Jarosz on State Rebuilding of High Peaks Wilderness Roads Challenged in Court
  • Marlene V Thompson on Supporting the Poor in Saratoga County
  • Sue L on Hair Ice and Frost Flowers
  • dave on Catskills Resort History: The Beginning of the End

Recent New York Books

The Great New York Fire of 1776
The Sugar Act and the American Revolution
battle of harlem hights
Ladies Day at the Capitol
voices of wayne county
CNY Snowstorm book front cover
The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era
Expanded Second Edition of Echoes in These Mountains
historic kingston book

Secondary Sidebar

preservation league
Protect the Adirondacks Hiking Guide