52 Ancestors: Worship - The Huguenots

Upon seeing the prompt for this week, I struggled to decide what to write. Two things immediately came to mind. The first was my grandfather's line. My grandfather was born Jewish, and one of his grandfathers was a Rabbi--in the old country, possibly? I'm not entirely certain. But I talk about that side of my tree a lot, and so I think today I will focus on another group of people whose religion was used against them.

Before I begin, I have to say this is an unproven story I learned from my family. That one of my Welsh lines had connections to the Huguenots. I looked into it, googling the terms Welsh and Huguenot, and came across an article (which I have since lost) stating that there was a small group of Huguenots who settled in Wales and became known for their weaving. Which is what led me to believe that my Gabriels/Howells line was the one that was likely of Huguenot descent, as I knew that line had been weavers to a certain point. But I have also learned that proving Huguenot descent is not an easy thing, unless you manage to connect them to one of the Huguenots on different lists. Which I have yet to do. But I keep trying.

So for those who don't know who the Huguenots are, I'll offer a highly simplistic explanation. They were a group of protestants in Catholic France in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Catholic Church felt threatened by this group, leading to over a century of violence against Huguenots. Finally the Church convinced the French king to make any Protestant faith illegal. Huguenots had been fleeing the country for generations, and this was the final blow, causing those who could to flee the country.

If my family story is correct, it means we have some French ancestry. I don't know when our branch would have fled France, or whether the Welsh Huguenot weavers were actually my weavers, but I do know that my great-great grandfather's family were known for their weaving skill. For generations, it was how they made their money. I'm not entirely sure when that stopped being part of my direct line, though as technology advanced, people with those skills were replaced by factory-made cloth, so probably sometime about the beginning of the industrial revolution.

So here's the line as I have it, working back in time:

• My great-grandmother was Eliza (known as Bessie) Howells who was born in southern Wales in 1885 
• Her father was Gabriel Howells, born in northern Wales in 1849
• His father was Howell Gabriel, born in northern Wales in 1822
• His father was Gabriel Howel, born in northern Wales in 1794

Beyond this point, between myself and the extended Gabriel/Howells clan online who have been tracing their family tree, we do have two more generations back:

• Gabriel Howel's father we now have listed as having been born in 1766 in northern Wales
• And his father was Howel Gabriel, born in 1740.

I don't have a birth location for that last Howel, but it's still at least 60 years after the Huguenots fled France, so still well after the person who would have come from France. That means that if this is my Huguenot line, that they'd been in Wales for at least three generations by the time that Howel was born.

For me, the real curiosity of this family line is the naming tradition. While Wales is a patronymic country, meaning that children take on their father's name as their surname, that is not quite what my family did. For generations, the eldest son took on his father's name as his surname--but his siblings used their father's surname as their surname. It leads me to wonder if maybe this special naming tradition of switching back and forth between Gabriel and Howel as surnames has something to do with our Huguenot heritage. I have no proof of this, though, just a supposition. If anyone knows of a tradition like this, I'd love to hear about it.