I was listening to one of Dr John Dehlin's old podcasts recently, and he had a guest on who made some unusual claims about the level of Welsh influence in early Mormonism:
You would hear Welsh spoken as often as English in Nauvoo. (I expect this is hyperbole, but still). The Tabernacle Choir originally sang in Welsh. The first language that the Book of Mormon was translated into was Welsh.
Is anyone able to shed any light on these claims? I've never heard of a special relationship between the early Mormons and Wales before.
I have many welch ancestors..but they came much later..but in Utah in Tooele County..a lot of ancestry from Wales and Sweden. Interesting...going back to my geneology I guess. I wonder if those who came by boat had relatives already here???
Brigham Young sent a large group of Welsh converts to settle the Malad Valley. They still have a lot of the old Welsh traditions and are quite upfront and proud of their history. You can find a lot information here.
Malad Valley residents invite everyone to the Malad Valley Welsh Festival to celebrate the rich Welsh heritage that has contributed to the quality of life in the settlement of this beautiful valley.
Welsh pioneers were the first to settle in the Malad Valley in the 1860s. One of their many Welsh traditions was an annual cultural arts event called an eisteddfod, with roots going back 900 years.
Eisteddfod was celebrated locally for many years until World War 1. In 2005, after a 90 year break, this annual cultural event, now called the Malad Valley Welsh Festival, once again became a reality.
Today, Malad Valley, Idaho, has the largest per-capita concentration of people of Welsh ancestry outside the country of Wales itself. For that reason, many residents of the Valley enjoy reestablishing their Welsh roots.
"Jesus gave us the gospel, but Satan invented church. It takes serious evil to formalize faith into something tedious and then pile guilt on anyone who doesn’t participate enthusiastically." - Robert Kirby
Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer. -- Henry Lawson
I thought this thread was going to be about Moby Zelph.
"Any over-ritualized religion since the dawn of time can make its priests say yes, we know, it is rotten, and hard luck, but just do as we say, keep at the ritual, stick it out, give us your money and you'll end up with the angels in heaven for evermore."
Wow, it looks like I might be related to a some of you fine people.
Others have already backed this up, but I would also contextualize this by pointing out that 1) Welsh was much more widely spoken in Wales in the nineteenth century than it is today, 2) unlike the case of Irish until the end of that century, Welsh-speaking communities were also highly literate and were an actively reading public, so it makes sense that that activity was continued in the USA and used in evangelization, and that 3) because Welsh nationalism had a complicated relationship with the Welsh version of the Church of England, the most likely groups open to conversion were Welsh-speaking communities, who also tended to be rather cool towards Anglicanism and were a hotbead of Noncomformists, etc.
In my own experience, I know from my grandmother, who was a Welsh speaker (at least in her earliest years; don't think she ever spoke it as an adult), that there were still Welsh language newspapers in Carbon and Sanpete counties when she was a kid.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
Symmachus makes some good points. Anglicanism was already a busted flush in Wales by the time that Mormonism came along. There was a famous religious census in 1851, and it showed that only half of all Brits went to church and only half of those went to the Church of England. In Wales, that last figure went down to something like 20% (this is all from memory). In business terms, the hold of the monopoly provider had been well and truly broken, and the situation was ripe for some Yankee entrepreneurs to move in and open a Cardiff office.
