It is excellent to have the full text of those MIs up, Jo. I appreciate your pursuing the matter with the parish; and as you say, an especially big thank-you is due to the vicar there, Michael Williams, for having helped us all by providing the transcriptions. (I hope he now has the link for this thread, so that he can inspect -- or even expand/correct -- our little hoard of data about some of his illustrious predecessors!)
These thoughts occur to me in the first instance, as they probably have to other followers of this thread:
1. It is interesting that the Nephew (d.1817) and his widow are commemorated both on the wall plaque and on the floor slab. It is notable that the plaque, as transcribed, records his age at death but fails to specify when he died. Normally, If one or other of those pieces of information is to be omitted, the date of death is given priority for preservation and the age is what suffers "deselection". It may be that the uncle's MI on the plaque was not written until many years after his death and was carved contemporaneously with the Nephew's own part. Closer inspection of the lettering style and degree of aging would perhaps reveal whether the carving was done at separate times and whether one or both parts of the plaque antedated the floor slab. (The slab, of course, does supply the Nephew's missing date of death.)
2. The plaque confirms what we know from the CFHS's version of the PR, i.e. that both the Uncle and the Nephew were buried and not just commemorated at Llanrhaeadr. The slab, on the other hand, records dates of death but is silent about places of interment; so someone would need to inspect the relevant PR to confirm the location of the Great Nephew's last resting place.
3. The transcription of the floor slab records the Great Nephew's year of death as 1878. But we know that the correct year was 1876: see
For the record, FreeBMD shows a death in Q1 1876 in Ruthin RD in the name Robert Lloyd A Roberts, at the age of 78 years (ref 11b 281). North Wales BMD narrows this to the sub-district of Llandyrnog -- which included the parish of Llangynhafal.
and also
His successor as Rector of Llangynhafal is shown as having arrived in 1876. Earlier in the section about the same church, on p.106, appears this:
The memorials in the church include the brass lectern to Rector R. Ll. Anwyl Roberts, 1831-76, and Ellen his wife
The 6s and 8s in this inscription are evidently hard to distinguish: W M Myddelton's transcript, as typed up by E W Topham Steele (see Reply 12 above), had the Great Nephew's MI as "ob 6 Mch 1876".
4. It is useful to have the Uncle's and the Nephew's respective ages at death confirmed by their MIs. The Uncle's MI matches his university matriculation record in suggesting 1719 as his year of birth; and the same sources point to 1747 for the birth of the Nephew.
5. Michael Williams's note at the end of Reply 25 reminds us of what Thomas's HDSA has to say on these people in its Llanrhaeadr section. The MI transcripts have now made it quite clear that the Uncle's wife Margaret Holland of Conway was not commemorated on either the mural tablet or the floor slab -- which only mention the Nephew's wife Margaret Prichard of Dinam. As previously discussed (see Reply 11 above), one has to conclude that Thomas -- or a local transcriber who supplied him with information -- derived Margaret Holland's name from some other source, and then mistakenly attributed it both to the mural tablet and to the wrong Robert Roberts.
6. As indicated by numbered para 2 of my extract from the Topham Steele typescript and by p.46 of Griffith's Pedigrees (both cited in my Reply 12), the Great Nephew went on to multiply the scope for confusion among Roberts wives by following his father's example and marrying a Prichard -- his first cousin Ellen, second daughter of his uncle the Revd Richard Prichard of Dinam. Perhaps fortunately, she is not included on either the mural tablet or the floor slab. But the Topham Steele typescript indicates that she did have an MI at Llanrhaeadr, at least when Myddelton visited a century or so ago. If the typescript is to be believed, perhaps there are additional MIs to the Great Nephew and his family to be found on one or more gravestones in the churchyard.
7. I know of no evidence to suggest that the John Roberts who became vicar of Llanrhaeadr in 1776 and Archdeacon of Merioneth in 1785 (as cited from HDSA by Michael Williams) was one of the same Roberts family (i.e. of Goppa); but it would be interesting to hear if any reader of this thread knows differently.
Rol
