“Being Welsh is a massive part of my identity,” Amy Dowden says at the start of her episode of Who Do You Think You Are? She was the first Welsh professional dancer on Strictly Come Dancing. She now wants to find out if her family are entirely Welsh. She also wants to find out more about her paternal grandfather Frank, who was adopted, and investigate a rumour of “a murder” in her mother’s family.
Amy starts by visiting her distant cousin Wyn. He explains that the alleged murder victim was Elinor Jenkins, Amy’s 3x great aunt. He shows her a note in an old family Bible, which says: “In memory of Elinor Jenkins who was shot dead by the cruel man Offley Owen”.
To find out more, Amy meets historian Dr Angela Muir. Angela shows her an old newspaper article which says that Elinor, who was aged 13 or 14, was working as a servant at a local farmhouse. Humphrey or Offley Owen, another servant aged 17, was trying to show Elinor, also known as Nellie, how his gun worked and accidentally shot her, not knowing it was loaded.
However, Amy is suspicious of Offley’s story: “I don’t see this as an accident.”
It’s not clear whether it was an accident or not. Offley was charged with manslaughter, but the prosecution decided not to present a case.
“They’re maybe not thinking about the victim in all this, and the victim’s family, which is my family,” Amy says. “I kind of feel like there was no clear closure.”
However, the newspapers say that Elinor’s funeral was widely attended in the community and she was “highly respected in the neighbourhood”. She is also remembered in the name of a local valley, Cwm Nell.
“She’ll never be forgotten,” Amy says. “Her roots are here and will always belong here.”
Next, Amy wants to find about her grandfather Frank. She learns that Frank’s birth parents were called Bill and Louisa. Louisa was born in England, so Amy is surprised that she isn’t actually “Welsh through and through”.
Bill joined the Royal Navy during the First World War and was stationed on HMT Davara, a minesweeper, tasked with removing German mines from British waters.
In 1917, the Davara was part of a convoy of ships off the coast of Scotland. Another minesweeper, HMT Earl Lennox, sunk. Bill was among five men who set out to rescue the survivors in a small boat and was commended for his bravery.
“I was worried that my great grandfather Bill wasn’t going to be a particularly great person,” Amy says. “I was so wrong.”
After the war, Bill went back to working as a coal miner. In 1921, coal mines were returned to private ownership after being run by the government during the war. The owners of Bill’s colliery wanted to halve worker wages. When the workers refused to accept the new conditions, they locked them out of the site. Bill and Louisa would have faced poverty while raising six children.
Worse, Louisa was already ill. She died at the age of 39 in May 1921. Amy is shocked to read on her death certificate that the cause of death was “Carcinoma Mammal”, or breast cancer. Amy has previously been treated for breast cancer and is moved to tears at the parallels between her and her ancestor.
“Knowing what she went through is horrible,” Amy says. “But also – I’m lucky, I’m still here. It took her life. So it’s a bit raw.”
She speculates that Louisa and Bill had to make the “very difficult decision” to have their son Frank adopted because of the strain on the family: “That must have been absolutely heartbreaking.”
Amy pays her respects at Bill and Louisa’s grave: “I hope he knows the decision he made was the right decision for my grandfather Frank.”
Reflecting on what she’s learned about her family, Amy says: “They were definitely fighters, they obviously needed to dig deep, and there’s been many times in my life when I’ve needed to dig deep. I definitely see a like for like between them and me.”
