How Welsh is your name?

Welsh General / Questions
#12

There were quite a few Italians in the UK before WW2. And although it’s a cliche, there is some truth in the idea that wherever you find good ice-cream in the UK, you will find Italians involved somewhere along the line - certainly in the past. A cousin of my mother’s married into an Italian ice cream family. They had several successful ice-cream cafés in one of the seaside towns in the north-west of England, and at least one of them is still running - I had an ice cream there a few years ago.

I think Italian ice-cream can be (or used to be) found all over the UK, but I gather it was particularly the case in Glasgow for some reason - no doubt on account of all the hot weather they have up there …
…The Bill Forsyth / Bill Paterson film “Comfort and Joy” sort of satirises this, I would say.

Francis Rossi, of Status Quo, comes from an Italian “ice cream family”, in the south of England. He used to joke (maybe it wasn’t a joke) that if he hadn’t made it in the music business, he would have ended up driving an ice cream van.

Edit: Found this:

Edit2: Another take on this:

(and as I slightly suspected, many traditional places have closed, and one wonders how long the rest can survive, which is a pity).

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#13

Here on Ynys Wyth (Isle of Wight) the Minghella family have run an Italian-style ice cream business since the 1950s. Their son Anthony Minghella (1954-2008) went on to achieve fame as a film director, with The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley, and Truly, Madly, Deeply, among others.

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#14

Then there was Joe Cascarini in Swansea.

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#15

Sad that he died so young. I tend to get him confused with Alfred Molina (half-Italian, half-Spanish, apparently - no ice-cream connection, as far as I can tell).

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#16

This worked very well for my mother’s family name - Gravelle. It confirms what I found in ancestry.co.uk namely that there has been an enclave of us around Kidwelly for a couple of hundred years. It also picked up our Manchester branch (Sadly I was not able to establish a link between me and Wales’ greatest ever centre). As for Jones - well there are far too many of us. :laughing:

The case of my ex-wife’s maiden name made me wonder about the statistical basis of the map, however. She had an unusual (in the UK) German/Swiss name and the map shows a hot cluster round Aberdeen. I’m pretty sure that the total number bearing that name round this cluster was six.

I’m adding my thanks to @jo-hornagold1 for posting the link. - Diddorol iawn :slight_smile:

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#17

I lived in Hoddesdon just north of the M25 and could sit in my garden and listen to my neighbors speaking Italian to each other. Best selection of pasta in the local shops I’ve ever seen, Yum! There is a huge community of Italians running market gardens in the Lea Valley. Follow the river towards London and you reach the Olympic Park.

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#18

That was rather fun… :slight_smile:

[Apparently Jones is from Wales… :wink: ]

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#19

Question linked to Jones… If j is a borrowed letter and not an original part of Welsh alphabet how would Jones have been written originally?

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#20

In other news: Pope still Catholic; Bears off to the woods for a number 2. More at 11.

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#21

And Italians seem to have spreaded (hopefully not melted) the best ice-cream around the world. Still make the best ice-cream in the world! :sunglasses::wink:

p.s. it’s a bit off-topic but since we got on the topic we can’t understand why a lot of non-Italians make great pizza (BTW didn’t get to try it, but the one in Cardiff market at Ffwrnes looked great!), you can often find great cappuccino and espresso as well in many countries—but never eaten one good non-Italian-made gelato ever! :smiley:

#22

Coco Gelato in Cardiff is supposed to be very good, but gelato isn’t my thing so I can’t really comment.

So not like this “Italian” monstrousity we had in the UK in the nineties?

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#23

:scream: for the way the gelato looks (although I have to admit also some Italian brands you can find at the supermarket here look just slightly better than that - although the tutti frutti flavour especially is a foreign countries-only classic!)

:scream: :scream: :scream: for the “Gino oh Gino Ginelli!” jingle that got stuck in my head! :rage:

p.s. I just had a look at some pics of Coco Gelato…well…uhmmm…definitely too much stuff on those gelatos, keep it simple is the rule!

#24

Still make the best ice-cream in the world! :sunglasses::wink:

And my childhood favourite - “Jake” Carini’s on Beaufort Hill made the best Italian Ice Cream in the world (and, I believe, still do :slight_smile: )

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#25

This Carini’s?
Can’t tell about the ice-cream but I like the guy’s (English) accent!
By the way I talked with a guy from Abergavenny and his accent - both English and Welsh - was totally different - I wonder if it’s an Italian touch here or every town is different?

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#26

Dio mio / Duw, Duw, where DID you find that?? :clap: :clap: :laughing: That’s exactly the shop and the family. I was born 200 yards away from the shop on Beaufort hill nearly 74 years ago. I used to spend half my summers with my Beaufort grandparents in my birthplace and visits to “Jake’s” were a regular treat - usually for icecream (between wafers rather than a cone) and occasionally for chips.

Jake’s son’s accent in this marvellous film is authentic Ebbw Vale. Abergavenny (12 miles down “Black Rock”) is a bit posher. Ebbw Vale (or Glyn Ebwy as it bacomes during Eisteddfods) has its own sing-song, idiosyncratic dialect, which is very dear to me. An example would be “I do go down b’there often” for “I often go there.” “By here” meaning “here” is pronounced exactly like the French pronounce “Bayeux” of tapestry fame.

If you (Gisella) remind me when we meet in Tregaron, I’ll be happy to talk to you in fluent Beaufort (and maybe a bit of Welsh, too. :smile:)

Diolch o galon / grazie tanto for this wondeful, nostalgic link.

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[Tour diary - Day 3 p.1 Clonc-edigion] Roaming around Wales, speaking Welsh
#27

I’ve heard it said that it comes originally from ‘ap Sion’ - and that the J only came in when mine registry officers from England were writing names down…

#28

Back in the 80s and 90s (I think), the one-time very British (nowadays owned by Unilever) ice-cream maker, Wall’s, marketed a range of ice-cream called “Gino Ginelli”. It was obviously meant to be an Italian-style ice-cream, but to what extent any actual Italians were involved in making it, I have no idea. From googling around, it seems that Wall’s may have licensed the name from another firm, but I can’t find any details. It’s no longer available, at least in this country. I saw a posting somewhere that said someone had seen it in Ibiza(!).

Wall’s used to have (may still have) a factory in Gloucester where I was born and lived till the age of 11, and we always used to buy Wall’s ice-cream - it was very un-Italian in style though, certainly in those days! There were basically two choices (at least from the local shops).
For individuals, you’d buy a rectanguloid block of ice-cream about 4 inches long and 1 inch thick. Then you could either put that between 2 suitably sized thin wafers - if you wanted it like that, you just asked for “a wafer” - that was a grown-up’s ice-cream. But we kids always had “a cornet” which was the identical ice-cream, but in a wafer that was a bit like a modern ice-cream cone, but with a rectanguloid piece attached, to hold the ice cream. (You had to be careful or it would fall out).

Choices were “white” (vanilla) or (if you were very lucky) “strawberry”.

For family consumption, you could buy a “block” which was a much bigger version of the small “wafer” ice-cream, enclosed in a cardboard box. At home, you could cut this into wafer-sized portions, and either hold them in wafers, or put them in a bowl with some fruit or something, or (as a special treat in our house), drop it into a large glass of lemonade, where it would froth up, and probably over - messy, but lovely - we called that “an ice-cream soda”.

There were also choc-ices, but that was almost always only at the pictures (cinema), as were “tubs” of ice-cream, which in those days were cardboard, with wooden (not plastic) spoons - much more ecologically sound, and you could chew the spoon, if you were so inclined (and of course I was :slight_smile: ).

It was probably some time in the mid-1960s that soft ice-cream started to appear, e.g. in “Mr Softee” ice-cream vans, and also in some shops. I dread to think what chemicals they put into it in those days to make it soft.

(having typed all that, I see Steven Branley has beaten me to it re: Gino Ginelli, but I’ll let my comments stand. :slight_smile: )

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#29

Yeah. I’m not sure if that’s 100% true. In fact, being a bit pedantic I know, it’s actually Upjohn that comes from ap Sion. I suspect that many Joneses were created from people who didn’t actually have surnames as such. They may have just had genealogies (patronyms but not really surnames - reminders of hereditary rights) that ended or maybe started or just contained Sion (or even John in parts of Wales where English names had become fashionable) and had to supply something when they encountered English officialdom either to register land or for tax or because of legal disputes. And, yeah, Sion was taken to be John, just as Siencin became Jenkin. But even then, the conversion to Jones and Jenkins wasn’t automatic. Search the link in the original post for the surname John, and you’ll see what I mean.

Then, if you want to see something really interesting, search again for Jenkins followed by Jenkin. How cool is that? :slight_smile:

BTW, I just re-read this and I now don’t know what I was trying to say, but I’m going to leave it here anyway.

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#30

I couldn’t say how accurate the thing is. I’m just happy to play
Grandmother’s maiden name is Jenkins.
Mum’s maiden name is Pressley.
Father’s/my last name is Burns.
Other Grandmother’s is Dobbs and her mother was a Cobb.
All I can say is I have a large amount of blood originating from the UK.

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#31

It was correct that most with my (ex husband’s) name are in the midlands but my dad was Jones and his parents were both Jones but we’ve gone a long way back and not traced family to Wales. Interesting with great grandparents at two of those came up with Wales - I must have come back ‘home’ for the past 33 years so it’s good I’m going to finally learn the language :slightly_smiling_face:

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