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Welsh Diaspora
Welsh Diaspora
Within the British Isles:
Migration from Wales to the rest of Britain has been occurring throughout its history. Particularly during the Industrial Revolution hundreds of thousands of Welsh people migrated internally to the big cities of England and Scotland or to work in the coal mines of the north of England. As a result, much of the British population today have ancestry from Wales. The same can be said for the English, Scottish and Irish workers who migrated to Welsh cities such as Merthyr Tydfil or ports such as Pembroke in the Industrial Revolution. As a result, some English, Irish and Scottish have Welsh surnames ("Evans", "Jenkins" "Owen" etc.) and some Welsh have English, Scottish and Irish surnames — as a result, it is relatively rare in South Wales or English-speaking areas to find a person with exclusively Welsh ancestry.
Continental Europe:
Some thousands of Welsh settlers moved to other parts of Europe, but the number was sparse and concentrated to certain areas. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a small wave of contract miners from Wales arrived into Northern France, and the centre of Welsh-French populations are in coal mining towns of the French department Pas-de-Calais.
Some Welsh also settled in Eastern Europe. The Ukrainian city of Donetsk was founded in 1869 by a Welsh businessman, John Hughes, (an engineer from Merthyr Tydfil) who constructed a steel plant and several coal mines in the region; the town was thus named Yuzovka (Юзовка) in recognition of his role in its founding. "Yuz" being a Russian or Ukrainian approximation of Hughes.
The city of Yuzovka (currently Donetsk), in Ukraine, was founded by John Hughes.
Anglosphere:
Welsh settlers from Wales (and later Patagonian Welsh) arrived in Newfoundland, Canada in the early 1900s; many had founded towns in the province's Labrador coast region.
It is believed that the eastern coast of Australia reminded Captain James Cook of the coast of South Wales (especially the Vale of Glamorgan coast, which he knew), hence the name he gave to it, "New South Wales". The first European colony in Australia was in New South Wales, beginning with the First Fleet of 1788. Welsh people numbered amongst these first settlers, and continued to arrive in the new colony through the British policy of penal transportation that was implemented for many criminal acts.
A gold rush began in Australia in the early 1850s, and the Eureka Stockade rebellion in 1854 was an early expression of nationalist sentiment. Amongst its leaders was the Welsh-born Chartist John Basson Humffray, one of a significant group of immigrants that came over from Wales at this time. Mass emigration from Wales to Australia got under way in the early 20th century with New South Wales and Victoria being particularly popular destinations. It is also said that around 20% of the population of New South Wales are at least partly Welsh descented. In the early twentieth-century most of the Welsh settlers were farmers, but later on there was emigration by coal miners to coalfields.
Welsh people have emigrated, in relatively small numbers (in proportion to population Irish emigration to the United States), to the USA (in particular, Pennsylvania) and Canada. Jackson County, Ohio was sometimes referred to as Little Wales and the Welsh language was commonly heard or spoken among locals by the mid 20th century. Malad City in Idaho, which began as a Welsh Mormon Settlement, lays claim to having more people of Welsh descent per capita than anywhere outside of Wales itself. Malad's local High School is known as the "Malad Dragons" and flies the Welsh Flag as its school colours. Welsh people have also settled as far as New Zealand and Australia.
South America:
Thomas Benbow Phillips (1829 - 1915) was a pioneer of the Welsh settlements in Brazil and, more successfully, Patagonia during the 19th century. He was born in either Manchester or Tregaron, where he grew up. Living in Manchester in 1848, he came into contact with cotton traders, who were eager to establish a colony in Brazil to grow cotton for their mills in Lancashire. Phillips travelled to Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil to begin making arrangements, and by the end of May 1851 had been joined by six groups of Welsh immigrants.
Phillips married a Brazilian woman, María Januaria Buena Florinal, but after her death in 1872 moved to the larger Welsh colony of Y Wladfa, that is a Welsh settlement in Argentina, which began in 1865 and occurred mainly along the coast of Chubut Province in the far southern region of Patagonia.
Other groups of Welsh people also migrated to Chile, Argentia and Brazil after the WWII in smaller numbers.
Southern Brazil (first) and Argentina (second) received waves of Welsh immigrants. In the second picture we can see a Tea House in Chubut.
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Originally Posted by Daniele90
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