I am hoping to visit Swansea this summer, my first time in the land of Wales — Patron Saint, David; Emblem, The Leek; Flag, a fierce Red Dragon. Why, beside the dragon and the leek, would I want to make such a pilgrimage?

Well, Swansea was a Roman outpost, was a Viking trading post and was fortified by their cousins, the Normans, after the conquest. It was an important industrial port in the days of coal mining and iron works and was bombed by the Third Reich in 1941 for that reason.

Since the Welsh are famously musical, it is no surprise it has also produced Spencer Davis, Badfinger and Bonnie Tyler. Not to mention an archbishop of Canterbury, a physicist who helped invent radar, a Nobel Prize economist, the poet Dylan Thomas, the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones and a bunch of boxers, rugby, soccer and cricket stars I have never heard of.

Almost all of the above left Wales to seek their fortune. And so did Howell Williams (1828-1900) and his wife Elizabeth (Bessie) Owens (1833-1923). I wouldn’t be swerving from a visit to England to stop in Swansea if it wasn’t for them. Who are they? They are the grandparents of Nelle Williams, my maternal grandmother. They left Wales to come to America in the 1860s.

According to my grandmother, before that Howell was supposedly decorated by Queen Victoria for his service in the Crimean War. I doubt that the old girl actually bestowed the ribbon or medal, but it’s an interesting tidbit. So far, it has been hard to confirm.

Howell is also alleged to have served in the Civil War on the Union side. His obituary tells us so, but this too has been hard to prove. Six men of his name were in the Union Army, but five seem ruled out for various reasons, and the sixth seems a little shaky as well.

However, his marriage certificate from 1858 identifies him as a mariner. Apparently that implied a merchant mariner not a Navy man. So, he might have been in the Navy in both the Crimean and the Civil Wars. Unfortunately, Civil War records for the Navy are less complete than those for the Army. The success of a genealogical hunt is often decided by the survival of a single fragile record or its loss.

I know nothing about his or Bessie’s parents and hope to find a trace of them in Swansea’s archives, but failing that it will be interesting to see the place from which they made the long voyage to America. A lot of Welsh came during the second half of the 19th century for hard, but relatively well-paid work in the booming industrial economy.

Howell and Bessie first appear in the 1870 census in Baltimore where they may have come ashore. Later, they moved to Niles, Ohio where my grandmother was born. It’s in the coal and steel corridor that runs from Cleveland through Youngstown to Pittsburgh. Howell was a puddler in the steel mills and a proud member of the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers, a forerunner of the United Steelworkers Union.

He also supported the Republican Party, as did many Union veterans, and carrying the flag led a parade in 1896 for McKinley, who supported measures favorable to labor. Like most new immigrants, the Welsh tended to congregate, and at his funeral, a Welsh-speaking reverend presided and a Welsh choir sang. When I was young, I remember my grandmother visiting several old folks in a Welsh retirement home.

I have a little 19th century tintype from a photo studio in Swansea that shows a woman who might have been Bessie, but no picture of Howell. Even if I add no more facts about his early years from visiting their home turf, it is still oddly moving to plant your feet where your ancestors once walked almost two hundred years ago.

Those are my grandmother’s paternal ancestors, and the first of that line to come to America. However, she had one more connection to Swansea that I have uncovered. Her mother was Ada Rumsey, and almost all of her forebears were from England, many of dissenting religions who fled discrimination to settle in New England in the middle of the 17th century.

But there is one Welshman among them, Obidiah Bowen, who was born in 1627 in Swansea. By 1657, he and his two brothers were in America. I don’t know if they had a hand in picking the name of the town in which they lived, but I like to think so, because Obidiah Bowen died in 1710 in Swansea, Massachusetts.

It is weird to think that I wouldn’t be here if he had not pulled up stakes almost 400 years ago and come to the New World, but it’s so. Not just for me, but for almost every American. We ought to pause more often to be grateful to them for the gift.