I was listening to one of Dr John Dehlin's old podcasts recently, and he had a guest on who made some unusual claims about the level of Welsh influence in early Mormonism:

You would hear Welsh spoken as often as English in Nauvoo. (I expect this is hyperbole, but still).
The Tabernacle Choir originally sang in Welsh.
The first language that the Book of Mormon was translated into was Welsh.

Is anyone able to shed any light on these claims? I've never heard of a special relationship between the early Mormons and Wales before.

Here yeah go: http://welshmormon.BYU.edu/Default.aspx

I have many welch ancestors..but they came much later..but in Utah in Tooele County..a lot of ancestry from Wales and Sweden. Interesting...going back to my geneology I guess. I wonder if those who came by boat had relatives already here???

Thank You!!

Ha! Excellent. Thanks very much for that

Brigham Young sent a large group of Welsh converts to settle the Malad Valley. They still have a lot of the old Welsh traditions and are quite upfront and proud of their history. You can find a lot information here.

http://welshfestival.com/

Thanks for that! I found my ancestor, Evan T. Jones, who came from Wales to Utah in 1868, in his late twenties.

I have to read thread titles more carefully.

I thought this thread was going to be about Moby Zelph.

Wow, it looks like I might be related to a some of you fine people.

Others have already backed this up, but I would also contextualize this by pointing out that 1) Welsh was much more widely spoken in Wales in the nineteenth century than it is today, 2) unlike the case of Irish until the end of that century, Welsh-speaking communities were also highly literate and were an actively reading public, so it makes sense that that activity was continued in the USA and used in evangelization, and that 3) because Welsh nationalism had a complicated relationship with the Welsh version of the Church of England, the most likely groups open to conversion were Welsh-speaking communities, who also tended to be rather cool towards Anglicanism and were a hotbead of Noncomformists, etc.

In my own experience, I know from my grandmother, who was a Welsh speaker (at least in her earliest years; don't think she ever spoke it as an adult), that there were still Welsh language newspapers in Carbon and Sanpete counties when she was a kid.

Iechyd da, chaps. Maybe we're all cousins.

Symmachus makes some good points. Anglicanism was already a busted flush in Wales by the time that Mormonism came along. There was a famous religious census in 1851, and it showed that only half of all Brits went to church and only half of those went to the Church of England. In Wales, that last figure went down to something like 20% (this is all from memory). In business terms, the hold of the monopoly provider had been well and truly broken, and the situation was ripe for some Yankee entrepreneurs to move in and open a Cardiff office.

After England, the most successful mission to the British Isles was the Welsh. Scotland had limited success and Ireland basically had no success. I've been interested in diving more into the "why" of this but have never had the chance to chase it down fully. These are some of the tidbits I have collected. If you're interested, definitely read into Captain Dan Jones - interesting stuff.

https://byustudies.BYU.edu/content/reve ... -dan-jones

https://rsc.BYU.edu/archived/supporting ... irst#_edn1

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/topics/rel ... _centuries

Thank you! Those look like excellent resources. That Davies fellow sounds particularly interesting.

I wonder why the Scots were so resistant to the restored gospel.... In Ireland, the Protestant and Catholic churches had the population sewn up so tightly that there was really no room for interlopers; but that wouldn't have been the case to the same extent in Scotland.

Maybe D & C 89 has something to do with it:

Touché!, as they say in Pitlochrie.