I'm looking for information and background in connection with my great-grandfather and his family.
Thomas David ROBERTS was a civil/railway engineer who was involved with or built/supervised/maintained several of the mid/south Wales railways. He was born in Denbighshire in 1832 and wasn't christened with the David middle name, but in census from 1861 onwards and in everything else seen since then he's been T D, Thomas D or Thomas David Roberts.
Through the course of his life he worked down through mid-Wales and Brecon to Newport, where he died in 1901. He was appointed Resident Engineer to the Monmouthshire Railway & Canal Company in 1875, then when GWR absorbed this he ended up as Divisional Engineer with GWR.
I know a reasonable amount about him, including details of the railways he was involved with (mainly from a short bio published in Newport in 1897,
Contemporary Portraits & Biographies), but key details are still missing so I'll probably have various questions in case anyone can kindly help, but will start with properties.
It would be great if someone who knows the area can say I'm wrong, but having compared an old OS map with a modern one, it looks as if a place where TDR and family lived in the 1880s no longer exists.
It was at Malpas and called
The Grove (see image), on the banks of the Usk on a big bend, but it seems from a satellite image it's probably somewhere under a dual carriageway (A4024) by now, unless it's hiding in the trees. Does anyone have knowledge of this property, or be able to say when it 'went'? I was hoping it was still there and some day to get a photo -- better still, maybe even unearth an old one -- but from the modern map it doesn't look promising. The family was there in the 1881C, though at a guess they probably didn't own it.
By 1891 they were at
Penrallt, Banally(?)
Road, St Woolos, and in 1901 the address is
35 Stow Park Avenue, Newport. A 1901 directory lists him at
Penrallt, Stow Park Avenue, so with the same house name is it likely this is the same property as in 1891? Was Stow Park Avenue called by the other road name originally and be described as St Woolos? (I do see the St Woolos hospital nearby on a modern map).
I've "driven along" the road with Google street maps and found a house numbered 35, but would the numbering be the same over 100 years later?
Any help appreciated
