Welsh People - Welsh Emigration

Welsh Emigration

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.

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. 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. In 1852 Thomas Benbow Phillips of Tregaron established a settlement of about 100 Welsh people in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.

Internationally Welsh people have emigrated, in relatively small numbers (in proportion to population Irish emigration to the United States of America (USA) may have been 26 times greater than Welsh emigration), to many countries, including the USA (in particular, Pennsylvania), Canada and Y Wladfa in Patagonia, Argentina. 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.

Around 1.75 million Americans report themselves to have Welsh ancestry, as did 467,000 Canadians in Canada's 2006 census. This compares with 2.9 million people living in Wales (as of the 2001 census).

There is no known evidence which would objectively support the legend that the Mandan, a Native American tribe of the central United States, are Welsh emigrants who reached North America under Prince Madog in 1170.

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).