Wales and the Story of the Rhys Clan
(270 - 1800)

The story of the Welsh is a story of ambition unrealized throughout the ages. The people of Wales are Celtic in race, and Briton in character. They have not so much been the native people of Wales down through the ages as they are the native people of all the British Isles. Having immigrated to the Isles from the east after the end of the last Ice Age they lived for thousands of years as the sole proprietors of that land. Things changed in 49BC when Julius Caesar landed on the south coast of England with an army. The Romans colonized England, and over the next few centuries they absorbed the majority of native Britons, and pushed the remainder into the far corners of the island. Those corners are Scotland and Wales.

The old royalty of Wales, a system of Elders and Priests (The Druids) had disappeared under Roman pressure by the second century AD, and a new "royalty" was born, a royalty seated in the power of the four Roman Legions stationed in Wales. This is where our lineage begins, with Jacitus and his son, Paternus of the Red Robe (a Roman officer’s cloak), local Britons who came to some standing as officers in the Legions.

As Rome’s power declined, the Legions were called home to Italy to help protect the homeland, but these "Romanized" officers and their families often stayed, and formed the nucleus of a new aristocracy in Wales. By 500 Wales had become an isolated land of many small sates on the edge of the known world. She was beset by invaders on all sides as the Angles and the Saxons over-ran neighboring England and the Irish and Norsemen came from the sea. During these centuries ancestors of our particular line were the power in the Kingdom of Gwynedd on the Northwest coast of Wales. From this line four of the six major aristocratic lines of Wales were born, and the story of how this came to be is the story of the King of Gwynedd Rhodi Mwar, or Rhodi the Great.

Rhodi lived in the ninth century, and through his schemes and marriages came to rule all of Wales. It was the first time Wales had been ruled by a single power for five hundred years. Rhodi, upon his death split his Kingdom up amongst his sons, and the south part of Wales went to Cadell Ap Rhodi, King of Seisyllwg. Cadell was proud of his family and the aristocratic House of Deheubarth which he founded, and about 900 he commissioned a study by the monks to determine his family lineage. This is the lineage back to Jacitus that we have today. Cadell’s son was Hywell the Good, King of Wales. King Hywell codified the laws of Wales, and up until it’s replacement by English Common Law five hundred years later, it was called Hywell’s Law in the courts of Wales. This law, chiseled into ancient stone tablets in both Latin and Cormah (Welsh) can be found all over Wales today. Hywell’s grandson, Cadell Ap Enion built a castle at Dynfwr about 1000, a castle that still exists, and from this seat and with the descendants of his son Tewdwr Mwar Rhys, or Tewdwr the "greatly adored", was born the Rhys Clan, the ancestors of all the Rhys, Rees, Reese, Royce and Tudors in the world, as well as our Reeces.

This was the "golden age" of Wales, but it’s life was short lived, for with the death in battle of the great King Llywelyn II on November 11, 1282 (Llywelyn’s mother was a Rhys), the English over-ran Wales. This date lives in infamy amongst Welsh patriots today. The story of the next hundred years is that of the gradual replacement of the old Welsh families with the "new" English born aristocracy. As these proud old families were squeezed out of their traditional positions of power the pressure grew, until it exploded in the rising of Owain Glyn Dwr (Owain’s mother was a Rhys) in 1400. This uprising lasted for six years, but finally failed. Owain’s cousin Rhys was a leader in the revolt, and afterward he took to the mountains as a guerrilla fighter and continued the struggle for years. At last he, and all the other male leaders of the Rhys family were brought to their ends by the English, except for Thomas Ap Rhys of Carmathenshire. His was the only branch of the family not to actively support the revolt. After this time the English passed the Penal Statutes of Wales to prohibit the Welsh from holding any position of power in their own land, a situation which would last for the next hundred years for most Welsh, but not for the wily family of Sir Thomas Ap Rhys.

History records that it was Thomas’ son Rhys Ap Thomas who was the first to take advantage of an offer made by the King. An offer which allowed Welshmen to renounce there Welsh citizenship, and declare for England. This action led to the beginnings of the Anglo spelling of the name, Rees. This happened in 1475, and soon Thomas was named Sheriff of Carmathenshire. This was the beginning of a long involvement between the royal families of England and the Rhys clan. Others followed suit, and a Rhys is recorded as the Abbott of the big monastery at Strata Florida in the 1480s. The association with the royals of England was further strengthened by the actions of the Sheriff’s grandson, another Thomas, who led a thousand men of Ystrad Tywi to the aid of Henry V at the battle of Bosworth Field in August 1485. Here Henry Tudor, his cousin, defeated and killed Edward of England ripping the crown from his dying head, to found the Royal House of Tudor (named for Tewdwr Ap Rhys, our common ancestor). This led to his unheard of appointment of a Welshman to the position of High Justice of Southern Wales in 1496.

This association brought many benefits to the Rhys family, but it also brought danger. The grandson of Justice Rhys was executed by Henry the Eighth in 1525 for treason, but it is rumored that he spoke too freely about his dislike of Ann Boleyn, the King’s mistress, and as a result Henry trumped up the charges. The intrigues of Henry’s reign were too intense, and when Henry finally broke with the Catholic Church this was more than many a proud Welshman could stand. The Rhys clan left the court and began a darker, more troubled time in the turmoils of the religious changes that were taking place. The break between Anglican and Catholic Church left the Welsh in the middle. The Anglican Church had never been as strong in Wales as was the ancient Celtic Catholicism of St. Patrick of Ireland, and now with the great political tug of war going on between Rome and Canterbury many of the faithful of Wales turned to the Protestant faiths for solace. By the time of the reign of the great Tudor Queen, their cousin, Elizabeth I, many of the Rhys clan had turned to these "Calvinistic" faiths, Baptist, Presbyterian and Friends (Quakers) which had taken root in Wales. Throughout the late 1500s and into the next century these congregations grew, as did the Anglican efforts to suppress them. In Wales these groups became known as the "Non-conformists", and serious repression of the freedoms of these congregations began. Sion Dafydd Ap Rhys, known as a great man of learning and a patron of Welsh poets bemoaned the state of affairs in Wales in 1609. He saw that the nation was rent asunder by the divisions of secular strife, and that even the Welsh language and customs of a thousand years were falling to dust under such pressure. The desire to search for new horizons and opportunities in the New World was rising amoung the Rhys clan, who were now mostly Baptist and Quaker in their beliefs. It would be Sion Dafydd’s great grandson and namesake who would bring our ancestors to the shores of America late in life, in about 1700.

William Penn, an English Quaker led a movement to settle Pennsylvania in 1682 - 1701, and he promised his Welsh brethren a separate colony there. Although this separate territory never materialized, Welsh Non-conformists were drawn there like a moth to a candle for the next hundred years. The Reverend Daffyd, with his family landed at New Castle, Delaware on their way to this "promised land", and after a short stay in Cecil County, Maryland they settled in Pennsylvania near Lancaster. Here they officially adopted the name Rees, a spelling that became even more Americanized to Reese by the time of William’s birth in 1709. The reasons for he and his brother David’s move to North Carolina are lost in time, but they were in the company of a great migration of "Scotch-Irish", of which the Welsh were considered a part of, which occurred at that time. Other Reese families of the same stock moved to the same areas of Rowan, Iredell and Mecklinburg Counties in North Carolina as David and William did the 1750’s. As a group they had a huge impact on the area, and on the further movement west along the Wilderness Road, a path which started there and wound through Watuga in today’s Tennessee and through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.

Solomon Reese married a sister of Daniel Boone, his neighbor in Boonville, NC and is buried in the Friends Cemetery there, David Reese was a signer of the Mecklinburg Declarations in 1775, a date immortalized on the North Carolina flag, and is buried at Sugar Creek near Charlotte, and William Reese, who is most likely our ancestor, is buried in Southwest Iredell County near Statesville, NC. David was a great patriot statesman who had five sons who fought for American independence.

That Anthony came to Haywood County in North Carolina is a matter of fact, and that he is the father of our Reece clan is a matter of no dispute in the history of the family. The ties to William Reese are weaker, but the ties to the Pennsylvania Rees clan are absolute. There was a Jacob Rees who followed the original Rees movement from Wales to Pennsylvania (Beula) about 1770, but all the Reese, Rees, Rhys and Reece families of Utah, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Mississippi all come form the Pennsylvania stock of the eighteenth century, and all of them everywhere come from the original clan of Rhys of Wales. History has lost the stories of many of our forefathers, but many lie hidden under a thin veil. For me this veil was lifted a bit by a small bit of information given me by a fellow amateur in the study of genealogy which tied the Rhys name to our Reeces.

This document may not be accepted by the most professional of Genealogists, but if it raises that veil just a bit, it serves the purpose of expanding the rich heritage of our forefathers and presents a challenge to all those who have the blood of this amazing family in their veins to fill in the blanks.

Bob Jones 1997