Or, if you hail from West Wales, there's the Spanish ships wrecked on Pembrey Sands routine. Perhaps one parent - usually fair-skinned - makes mischief with haughty references to "your father's family", as though it's awash with Romanian Gypsies who "came over" in wagons to flog pegs. "Looks like a Portuguese sailor," say some, looking round at the modern-day mob with their pale eyes and skin, and wondering where the heck he came from. The more fun the family, the better the story they concoct to explain the beady black eyes staring out of a sepia family photo. How else to explain the fact their children turn "black" in a bit of sun and all get mistaken for French/Spanish/Italian depending on which country is the holiday destination of choice? How many Welsh families like to have a bit of a joke about something "rum" in one of the parents' family trees? Pair the two together in a marriage and you can still get a brood with the curly dark locks, insolent dark eyes and chunky brown limbs of one of those spoilt Mediterranean fat kids you see running about piazzas in the evenings. You either have the dark, swarthy customers with near-black eyes or the pale- skinned, finer-boned lot with beautiful, startling blue eyes. The Welsh sometimes seem easily categorised on a superficial level. Yes, a picture of someone who has the dark eyes, hair and colouring of a "foreigner" - often causing the family to think there must have been some "exotic" influence way back when. LIKE a miner or a steelworker, many of the Welsh have got one of them somewhere in their family tree. Perhaps that explains the swarthy Welsh looks, says Catherine Jones New DNA research claims we may have more in common with the English than we thought - we both descend from Basques.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |