Books? Definitely A History of Wales by Dr John Davies. Brook no imitations. Well ... unless you want to unload £60 plus postage and wait a couple of months then you could get the new Encyclopaedia of Wales .

That's all for general background. Then different chunks of history are written up by various people. If there's one thing Wales has a lot of, it's authors. Hopefully in a year or two we'll also have a new history of Welsh traditional music (English lang. publication). I know the author is on the last chapter, and University of Wales Press is waiting to publish it.

Thanks, mg, for the link. Don't know what happened there. We must be related. My mother has Williamses from Cornwall in her family and she reckons they came originally from Wales. Quite likely as the quarrymen used to travel (by sea) between North Wales, West Wales, and Cornwall, depending on where the work was. Interestingly, there's a song or two that generally are found only in North Wales but also crop up in one village in Pembrokeshire (Mathry). There was a quarry there and the supposition is that the songs travelled with the quarrymen.

sian