The village
Carno is a small village in the mountainous region of north central Wales. In about 1850 there were 166 homes in the village itself with 969 residents. In 2021 there were 736 residents recorded. It is noted in history as the place where a battle that proved decisive in the sovereignty of North Wales was fought in the year 946 A.D.
Those population figures matter to this archive. A village of fewer than a thousand people, set among the hills between Caersws and Llanbrynmair, could lose a family to emigration and feel it. Carno had fewer residents in 2021 than it had in the decade the pioneers left.
Farming and flannel
The Williams farm at Carno grew wheat and oats, which the family turned into bread and a kind of oatmeal porridge, and kept dairy cows for milk, butter and cheese. With a few vegetables it was self-sufficient. Susanna Williams supplemented that income on her fine oak loom, weaving Welsh flannel that was in constant local demand, and walked ten miles over the mountains to the market at Newtown to sell it.
That combination of subsistence farming and hand weaving describes much of upland Montgomeryshire in the 1840s, and it explains the pull of the coalfield: when the farm could not support a son, the son went south to Tredegar or Merthyr for wages. For many, the mining valleys were where they first heard Latter-day Saint missionaries preach.
Pioneers from Carno
Anyone recorded in the archive with Carno as their home place appears here automatically. As records are added, this list grows without the page being edited.
Carno sits in the Montgomeryshire uplands, in the belt of Welsh-speaking parishes where Latter-day Saint missionaries worked from the mid 1840s. Emigration from these villages ran through Liverpool, and after 1855 the ships landed at New York rather than New Orleans. See the full timeline →
The 1850 figures of 166 homes and 969 residents, the 2021 figure of 736, and the battle of 946 come from the account supplied for this archive; the census returns and the standard county history should be cited directly before these numbers are treated as settled. Details of the Williams farm and Susanna’s weaving are family history rather than primary record.