Linda <email(a)lindakt.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
I have the census entries for an ancestor of mine, an Evan Powell, from
the 1881 and 1901 censuses. He was born around 1855.
The 1881 census gives his birthplace as Llaninthrol, Brecknock.
The 1901 census gives his birthplace as Llansorthe, Breconshire.
I can't find either of these places in my searches.
===================
Dear Linda,
I assume you have obtained these corrupted spellings from transcripts of
the censuses. It's quite possible that the original entries used
recognisable spellings but the transcriber, unfamiliar with Breconshire
and with the orthography of Welsh place-names, has misinterpreted the
handwriting.
In such cases, the best way to solve the mystery is to examine the
original handwritten version of these place-names by looking at images
of the relevant pages in the census enumerators' log books.
Images of the original entries in the 1881 census are available on
microfilm, e.g. at the appropriate county record office, at the National
Library of Wales, and at LDS Family History Centres.
Images of the 1901 census are available at 75p each via the Public
Record Office's Census website - at
http://www.census.pro.gov.uk/
If you already have these images but cannot read them, you could e-mail
them to Chris Elliott for him to upload onto his "Genehelp" website. His
Genehelp webpages are free pages where you can publish your
undecipherable document(s) and you may, as others have found, get a
number of valuable leads to decode the parts you cannot read. Genehelp
is at
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/yewtree/genehelp/
Kind regards,
John
----------------------------
John Ball, Ystalyfera, South Wales, UK
E-mail: wfha(a)clara.co.uk
Homepage:
http://home.clara.net/wfha/
Welsh Family History Archive:
http://home.clara.net/wfha/wales/
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