One of the most magical and rewarding aspects of researching someone else's family history is that you never know what can be uncovered - if you look hard enough.

At the moment, I'm investigating someone's family line and found an ancestor, Rosser Richards, who was an agricultural labourer living in the parish of LLanwonno in the 19thC. Nothing of note there, I thought.

How wrong can you be!

I always check local history books to see if folk are mentioned (using Google Books etc) and got a hit. There was a book written about Llanwonno in 1888. It is written in Welsh (it's in Cardiff library) but an English translation is out there. This is what the book tells us in part (using a rough Google translation) about a seemingly ordinary man:

A NOTED PRAYER MAKER - Rosser Richards
“Pontypridd forms an important part of Llanwynno parish and it would be unfair to not chronicle names and what I can remember about some of the magnificent characters of this town. I would be able to afford time to write a variety of chapters on the old characters of Pont-y-pridd-poets, traders, preachers, and employees….a lot of names rush in to my memory, and the personality of many of the old pilgrims of the Bridge lay in front of my mind, until I desired to give a picture of each and a chapter of each picture. Here are some of them…… Rosser Richard,…. All remarkable in some way or another.
Rosser's speciality was his enthusiastic feelings and wild times, and his dreaming prayers. He praised a match for one pound, and he also won; but I'm sorry, others have done the competition, and he did not know anything about it until he was over, and his prayer was best judged. Rachel, his wife, used to break out to embrace at the meetings. She was laughed as a girl many times under the influence of the word of the Word, and she was heard to lift her voice and sometimes break out to sing another time to weep, until she pulled the singing to sing and weep with...
When we were children, we saw Rosser coming for a while from the Bridge to Ynys-y-bwl, and to sit to my father's big chair, half an hour before the prayer meeting, was quite common; and the big look would be on the old black cap that he always had on his head. He traveled a lot to pray all over the country. At the end of his life he would like to go to the Gbes-wen, where he was welcomed by Caledfryn, and the cii, but he had something for his trouble, apart from carnival for his prayer. He was one of Penuel's members."

And there's more...

Imagine how my client will feel when he learns of this person in his direct ancestral line. Rosser is now not just a name in his tree.