Dave wrote:

Roy Lewallen, W7EL
Roy's surname is of Welsh origin. Queen Bodacia and her sisters
prevented
Romans who had conquered England in the BC era from conquering Wales.
There is a statue of that defiant queen on the side of the River
Thames
opposite the House of Commons and the House of Lords( and Big Ben).
Roy does not spell his name as in the traditional Welsh language.
Probably those on Ellis Island misspelled it not understanding the
lilting
accent of a Welsh miner.
Art


LOL. Sounds like my own family history, with the great grandfather paying
to change the spelling of the last name to correct it, and actually screwing
it up. He couldn't read either, but somehow he got the idea that it was
wrong, and went to the legal trouble of "straightening it out." Yeah,
right.

Thanks, I needed that this morning.

My family was in this country long before the Ellis Island immigration
center was established (and before the U.S. was created for that
matter), and the spelling came about as I described, not as Art
speculates. The origin of the name is almost certainly Welsh, and it has
a number of different spellings there, too, among which are Llywelyn,
Llewellyn, and others, probably for the same reason it has so many
different spellings here. The "Ll" is pronounced more like "Cl", but not
with a sound we have in English. But the Welsh pronunciation was surely
gone long before anyone attempted to spell it. I have no idea whether
the original immigrant was a miner as Art speculates, an indentured
servant, or a common criminal.

If I ever get a dog, its name will have to be Gelert.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL