When I told Gareth Jones — a Welshman with that glint of pride every Jones carries — that I had no idea how far back my lineage went, I was telling the truth. At the time, the idea of tracing the family past Wales’s green ridges felt absurd. I had consulting meetings to run, compliance memos to write, and dinner bills to sign. But Gareth was the sort who could turn genealogy into an act of diplomacy. “You never know,” he said, “your Jones might be one of ours.”

Decades later, with five thousand names sitting obediently inside an Ancestry.com GEDCOM file, it turns out he was right — spectacularly so.

The Welsh thread in my ancestry runs clear through the oldest parish records of Glamorgan and Carmarthenshire, but it doesn’t stop there. It plunges straight into the deep strata of Welsh legend and law. The earliest figure on record isn’t a farmhand or parish clerk; it’s Rhodri Mawr ap Merfyn, Rhodri the Great, who ruled Gwynedd from 844 to 878 CE and forged the first truly national Wales. His son, Anarawd ap Rhodri, carried the line into the next century, dying around 916 CE, while another son, Cadell, became the ancestor of the southern princes of Deheubarth. Out of that southern branch came Hywel Dda ap Cadell — Hywel the Good — whose legal code around 940 CE bound a fractious country into something like civility.

From there, the tree in my file veers, as all Welsh trees eventually do, into poetry and warfare. Owain ap Hywel defended Dyfed from Norse raids in the late tenth century; Gruffudd ap Cynan reclaimed Gwynedd from the Danes in 1094; Owain Gwynedd ap Gruffudd, ruling until 1170, declared himself Prince of Wales long before the English crown learned the phrase.  After them come centuries of Joneses, Davieses, and Robertses who left their mountain parishes for English markets, then for American ports, until the line surfaces again in the paper trail of the New World — men and women who swapped chapels for meetinghouses and law codes for constitutions.

So yes: I now know how far back my Jones lineage goes — to kings, lawmakers, and a people who measured nobility not by conquest but by stubborn endurance.

It’s an inheritance that can’t be traded on. No one offers consulting contracts to the descendants of Hywel Dda. But it’s an inheritance that matters, particularly in a nation currently choking on counterfeit heritage. Every MAGA demagogue now parades as a constitutional heir, every plutocrat as a Founding Father reborn.  The loudest patriots claim ancestry not to service but to sanctity, mistaking lineage for license.

Mine, at least, comes with receipts. Rhodri’s line held power by consensus more than coercion; Hywel Dda’s laws placed women, tenants, and even poets within the bounds of justice; Owain Gwynedd fought for a sovereignty rooted in land and language rather than dominion.  Their Wales was no paradise — but it was an early rehearsal for the democratic idea that government draws legitimacy from the governed.

That is what I like to tell Gareth now, when we exchange the occasional note across the Atlantic. He still lives in Spain; I live just north of Washington, D.C. We both answer to Jones, a name so common in Wales it might as well mean citizen.  In that sense, the lineage is the argument: that democracy isn’t an invention of 1776, but a long, uneven apprenticeship in belonging.

When Americans talk about heritage today, they mean marble and myth — the Founders, the flag, the filtered memory of perfection.  But the real heritage, the one worth keeping, lies in those who wrote laws rather than slogans, who governed through consent rather than grievance.  Mine begins in ninth-century Wales, but its moral coordinates are universal: power restrained by justice, pride moderated by decency, and identity grounded not in bloodlines but in the shared work of keeping a people free.

So, the next time someone in a red cap insists he’s defending the heritage of the nation, I’ll think of Hywel the Good — a Welsh king who believed the rule of law was better than the rule of men — and I’ll smile.  Because I already have the heritage they wish they had.

~ Dunneagin

PS If you enjoyed this chapter of our national chaos chronicles, you’ll love the eBooks — a curated archive of America’s ongoing attempt to govern itself while on fire.

Collected volumes are available on Kindle (Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus) and Gumroad (The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy & Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Vol. 2).

When I told Gareth Jones — a Welshman with that glint of pride every Jones carries — that I had no idea how far back my lineage went, I was telling the truth. At the time, the idea of tracing the family past Wales’s green ridges felt absurd. I had consulting meetings to run, compliance memos to write, and dinner bills to sign. But Gareth was the sort who could turn genealogy into an act of diplomacy. “You never know,” he said, “your Jones might be one of ours.”

Decades later, with five thousand names sitting obediently inside an Ancestry.com GEDCOM file, it turns out he was right — spectacularly so.

The Welsh thread in my ancestry runs clear through the oldest parish records of Glamorgan and Carmarthenshire, but it doesn’t stop there. It plunges straight into the deep strata of Welsh legend and law. The earliest figure on record isn’t a farmhand or parish clerk; it’s Rhodri Mawr ap Merfyn, Rhodri the Great, who ruled Gwynedd from 844 to 878 CE and forged the first truly national Wales. His son, Anarawd ap Rhodri, carried the line into the next century, dying around 916 CE, while another son, Cadell, became the ancestor of the southern princes of Deheubarth. Out of that southern branch came Hywel Dda ap Cadell — Hywel the Good — whose legal code around 940 CE bound a fractious country into something like civility.

From there, the tree in my file veers, as all Welsh trees eventually do, into poetry and warfare. Owain ap Hywel defended Dyfed from Norse raids in the late tenth century; Gruffudd ap Cynan reclaimed Gwynedd from the Danes in 1094; Owain Gwynedd ap Gruffudd, ruling until 1170, declared himself Prince of Wales long before the English crown learned the phrase.  After them come centuries of Joneses, Davieses, and Robertses who left their mountain parishes for English markets, then for American ports, until the line surfaces again in the paper trail of the New World — men and women who swapped chapels for meetinghouses and law codes for constitutions.

So yes: I now know how far back my Jones lineage goes — to kings, lawmakers, and a people who measured nobility not by conquest but by stubborn endurance.

It’s an inheritance that can’t be traded on. No one offers consulting contracts to the descendants of Hywel Dda. But it’s an inheritance that matters, particularly in a nation currently choking on counterfeit heritage. Every MAGA demagogue now parades as a constitutional heir, every plutocrat as a Founding Father reborn.  The loudest patriots claim ancestry not to service but to sanctity, mistaking lineage for license.

Mine, at least, comes with receipts. Rhodri’s line held power by consensus more than coercion; Hywel Dda’s laws placed women, tenants, and even poets within the bounds of justice; Owain Gwynedd fought for a sovereignty rooted in land and language rather than dominion.  Their Wales was no paradise — but it was an early rehearsal for the democratic idea that government draws legitimacy from the governed.

That is what I like to tell Gareth now, when we exchange the occasional note across the Atlantic. He still lives in Spain; I live just north of Washington, D.C. We both answer to Jones, a name so common in Wales it might as well mean citizen.  In that sense, the lineage is the argument: that democracy isn’t an invention of 1776, but a long, uneven apprenticeship in belonging.

When Americans talk about heritage today, they mean marble and myth — the Founders, the flag, the filtered memory of perfection.  But the real heritage, the one worth keeping, lies in those who wrote laws rather than slogans, who governed through consent rather than grievance.  Mine begins in ninth-century Wales, but its moral coordinates are universal: power restrained by justice, pride moderated by decency, and identity grounded not in bloodlines but in the shared work of keeping a people free.

So, the next time someone in a red cap insists he’s defending the heritage of the nation, I’ll think of Hywel the Good — a Welsh king who believed the rule of law was better than the rule of men — and I’ll smile.  Because I already have the heritage they wish they had.

~ Dunneagin

PS If you enjoyed this chapter of our national chaos chronicles, you’ll love the eBooks — a curated archive of America’s ongoing attempt to govern itself while on fire.

Collected volumes are available on Kindle (Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus) and Gumroad (The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy & Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Vol. 2).