| Name | Cardiganshire |
| Alt names | Cardigan | | | Sir Aberteifi | source: Wikipedia |
| Type | Historic county |
| Coordinates | 52.25°N 4.25°W |
| Located in | Wales ( - 1974) |
| See also | Dyfed, Wales | preserved county 1974-1996 | | Ceredigion, Wales | unitary authority since 1996 |
- source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
- source: Family History Library Catalog
| :the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia
Cardiganshire (Welsh: Sir Aberteifi) began to be administered as a county in 1282. By the 2011 UK census it had a population of 75,900. Its largest town, Aberystwyth, is one of the two administrative centres; the other being Aberaeron. Cardiganshire was considered to be a centre of Welsh culture and even now more than half the population speaks Welsh.
The county was mainly rural with over 50 miles (80 km) of coastline and a mountainous hinterland. In the 18th and early 19th century, there was more industry than today. Cardigan was the commercial centre of the county and the principal port of South Wales prior to the silting of its harbour. Lead, silver and zinc were mined in the hills of the county. The economy became highly dependent on dairy farming and the rearing of livestock for the English market. During the last century, livestock farming has become less profitable, and the population of Cardiganshire has been in decline as people moved to the more prosperous parts of Wales or emigrated to other countries.
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Between 1888 and 1974, the county was governed by Cardiganshire County Council, which took over the functions of county administration from the Quarter Sessions court in 1889. The county was abolished in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972 — and it was succeeded by the district of Ceredigion in the new county of Dyfed. This district became a principal area of Wales and a unitary authority on 1 April 1996 under the name of Cardiganshire, but changed its name back to Ceredigion the following day. Ceredigion, apart from minor realignments, identical borders to Cardiganshire.
Research Tips
- A 1900 Ordnance Survey map of the historic county of Cardiganshire is available on the A Vision of Britain through Time website. This shows all the old parishes within their urban and rural districts. Large farms and estates are also marked.
- Ceredigion Archives has a website with a list of their holdings, as well as historical notes on places in Cardiganshire.
- GENUKI has a page on each of the old counties of Wales and, under these counties, pages for each of the ecclesiastical parishes within the county. Information is gathered under a number of headings and the amount of information varies from parish to parish. Parish descriptions are based on a gazetteer dated 1835 and thus the emphasis is on ecclesiastical parishes. (Civil parishes were not yet established.) The submitter is very firm about his copyright. This should not stop anyone from reading the material.
- The GENUKI Pembrokeshire pages include, under Description and Travel close to the bottom of the page, a link "parish map" to a map website showing boundaries and settlements before 1850. On the linked page will be maps of several parishes located close to each other.
- GENUKI also provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area, but there is no guarantee that the website has been kept up to date for every county.
- FreeBMD provides a link to a list of the civil registration districts for each Welsh county from 1837 to 1996. Civil registration districts changed with varying densities of population and improvements in communication. Most counties and unitary authorities now have only one district. The list helps with providing names for the registration districts listed in the FreeBMD index and also as a guide for where to look for census entries.
- The FamilySearch Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI and these have been prepared at a later date. The Wiki may look like Wikipedia but the information has been provided for family historians. There are tables of links between the parishes in the historic counties of Wales and their post-1996 counterparts. This is the only genealogical website found that provides this information universally; others are not as thorough.
- Some words in Welsh come up time and time again and you may want to know what they mean or how to pronounce them. For example,
"Eglwys" is a church and the prefix "Llan" is a parish.
"w" and "y" are used as vowels in Welsh.
"Ll" is pronounced either "cl" or "hl" or somewhere in between. "dd" sounds like "th".
The single letter "Y" is "the" and "Yn" means "in".
"uwch" means "above"; "isod" is "below" or "under";
"gwch" is "great", "ychydig" is "little";
"cwm" is a "valley".
- In both Welsh and English all these words are commonly used in place names in the UK. Place names are often hyphenated, or two words are combined into one. Entering your problem phrase into Google Search, including the term "meaning in Welsh", will lead you to Google's quick translation guide. I'm no authority; these are just things I have picked up while building up this gazetteer for WeRelate.
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