The explanation of this is really quite simple.  When I first began the work, the most significant source of my family information was actually family itself.  That was back in the day when Great Aunts Margaret and Julie were still alive, and we happened to have the Bible from Grandpa John and Grandma Mary.  By corresponding with both Margaret and Julie, along with reference to birth notations in the Bible, I was able to take our family line back to William O. Roberts 1833-1892, and just barely to that of his father, who I understood to be Hugh Roberts at the time.  Unfortunately, that was it.  There was no on-line information at all associated with anything about Wales.  In the 80s the only alternative would have required a pilgrimage to whatever we might believe was the home region of our ancestors and then to hire a professional genealogist to unearth any missing information. 

 

Then I believe somewhere over the last 10 years or so official documents and census records for Wales began showing up in the Ancestry.com archives.  That information allowed me to search further, but what I discovered was that many of the records were punctuated with errors, and it became clear that there were many, many William Roberts individuals who also married Jane Jones ladies, and many of them had children with very similar common names as well.  Couple that with census records that only began in 1841, and the result becomes quite a bit of confusing information.

 

So it was only within the last few weeks that I decided my suppositions from the 80s were about as right as anything, and went back into a full court press of discovery.  I was able to find the family with a William Roberts born in 1833, but wherever documented, his father’s name seemed to be William as well, rather than Hugh.  And he was also married to a Jane.  This helps for you to begin to see what I refer to as the Roberts ancestry research rabbit hole.  That represents circumstances from which it is very difficult to make solid determinations as to family lines with any degree of certainty.

 

Finally, I turned to the Mormon database and there is where I found what I was looking for.  It properly identified our William from 1833, and named his father as Hugh, whose wife was actually a Catherine.  Now, one of the things that is very bothersome about family research is how very often it is found that people frequently go by their middle names rather than what might be a given name listed in a census.  So there is evidence that Hugh may well have been William Hugh Roberts, and Jane seems to be a Catherine Jane.  Once that assumption is made, some reasonably certain things begin to fall into place.

 

The Mormon database also helped to clear up a little mystery.  The 1841 census of Wales shows William-1833 was the first born of William (Hugh), also living with a 70 year old Ellin.  By searching in the Mormon database once again I was able to find that William (Hugh)’s father was also named Hugh, and he was married to an Elinear Evans.  So that helped to wrap things up very nicely, and also takes our Roberts family lineage back to the 1770s, when it essentially had always been stuck with the first family immigrant, William O. Roberts traveling to the U.S. in the late 1860s.

 

Because of this, it may now be possible to document the Roberts Family Lineage.  I have begun working on that and will hopefully be posting that on the Roberts tab in a week or two.