Welsh Roots

Looking at biographical information on the internet, I observe that Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins were Welsh. Hopkins is up there in my top ten favorite movie actors. I pray that I, as an Evans, am more like him than like his countryman Burton. The two are as different as night and day. I've liked about everything I've seen Hopkins in. An exception is The Desperate Hours remake, so vastly inferior to the original that starred Bogie and Frederic March. I've enjoyed a thing or two with Burton, but it would have been nice to see the bastard smile once in a while. He always seemed to take life and himself so very, very seriously. (I recall E.L.Doctorow, novelist, writing that Dick thought he was important, that his farts were important.) Hopkins obviously does not take himself seriously. If you want to see him playing himself, study The World's Fastest Indian.

I was delighted that the Evans forbears that I know of date back to at least the eighteenth century on this continent, knowing that I have a great-great grandfather named Charles Evans. I really like that name: Charles Evans. These folks were hard-working dirt farmers in Kentucky way back then. Charles was born in 1794 and married Lena Palmer in 1814 in Cynthiana, Kentucky. Lena was also born in 1794 in good old Kentucky, that "dark and bloody ground," as one translation of the name renders it. (Perhaps daughters of the American revolution are not all that hard to come by!) Charles and Lena moved to Trimble County and propagated, among others, James T., my great grandfather, who went away to be a corporal in the "Orphan Brigade" of the CSA, and then came home to beget with his wife Jo Agnes, John Thomas Evans I, my namesake. JTE1 was born during the American Civil War and died in 1916, 23 years before my birth, at the age of 56. My dad did not like his father but the baby, Roy Thomas, said that "Tom" was (1) not alcoholic and (2) was a very loving and not at all harsh father, as my dad had read him. Brother Bud told me that Tom had come to Madison before his death and was fascinated with the horseless carriages and telephones and electric lights of that big city.

Well, I guess Kentucky is far from Wales. One thing the two lands have in common is coal mines, but in the case of Kentucky they are far to the southeast, in the mountains, and my forbears settled in the north, where growing fruit (apples and peaches) and sot-weed (that's t'backer) are the agri-products.

And so to bed.