General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I just found out that one of my great great grandfathers served on the Confederate side [View all]REP
(21,691 posts)Some of the earliest Welsh immigrants were Quakers, coming to land they had bought in Pennsylvania to escape a threat of being burnt (this was around 1682). As late as the early 20th century, Welsh children were punished for speaking their own language in their own schools. In between, the history of the treatment of the Welsh people is not particularly pretty; my own grandmother referred to the English as the 'bloody English' (she was US-born but her mother was born in Wales).
As I mentioned in a previous post, in the mid 1800s, there were several planned Welsh communities in the midwest and upper midwest, including the one where another set of great parents and their family settled, Arvonia, Kansas. The wave of Welsh immigrants during this time period came largely to work on building the railroad.