Hello
Fortunately some years back I sketched the gravestone which marked the plot where my wife’s grandmother was buried. Not long after, we found the stone had been knocked over and shattered into several pieces. In the ensuing years the stone and the lettering has deteriorated so badly it has become illegible.
The top half of the inscription is in the Welsh language which translates as follows:
In Memory of, Margaret cherished wife of Watkin Watkins, Caerphilly, died on December 21st 1873 age 25 years old. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Lavinia Harriet Morris is my wife’s grandmother, Margaret was her mother’s sister, and died before Lavinia was born.
The sculptor W Davies named on the stone is William Davies, Margaret’s sibling. The Davies family were an old Caerphilly family of sculptors and monumental architects, generations of granite, stone and marble workers who had established the family business over 100 years to become by the 1920s the oldest established business of its kind in South Wales or the West of England.
Born in 1847, Margaret was the third of six children, Harriet (1843), William (1845), Margaret (1847), John (1851), Mary Ann (1853) and Elizabeth (christened 1866), to parents Eleazar Davies and Mary Ann Davies nee John. Margaret’s sister Mary Ann (1853) is my wife’s great grandmother; she married Harry Burcher, a tailor by profession, on 23 June 1877. They had five children; the first born was named Lavinia Harriet Burcher (my wife’s grandmother).
Regards for now, Roy
