Welsh Connections
WALES has always reached far beyond its borders.
Over the centuries, Welsh people have travelled, settled and built new lives across the world, taking their language, culture, traditions and family stories with them.
But the connections work both ways.
Some of the world’s best-known entertainers, actors, musicians, sports stars and historical figures have discovered Welsh ancestry in their family trees. Others have developed unexpected connections with Wales through work, friendship, music, sport or simply a long-standing affection for the country.
Welsh Connections brings those individual stories together.
It forms part of our wider Wales Around the World coverage, complementing our country-by-country features with the people, personalities and surprising links that connect Wales with communities around the globe.
Donny Osmond and Wales
Few international entertainers have enjoyed a relationship with Welsh audiences quite like Donny Osmond.
The American singer and performer discovered through BBC Wales programme Coming Home that his family history contains strong Welsh roots, including links with Merthyr Tydfil.
For Osmond, those discoveries added another dimension to an already long relationship with Welsh audiences built through decades of concerts and television appearances.
READ: Donny Osmond and Wales – the family connection behind an American superstar →
Dolly Parton and Wales
Country music legend Dolly Parton also had an intriguing Welsh connection.
Her mother’s Owens family has been linked through genealogical research to Welsh ancestry, while that connection acquired a remarkable musical twist when Welsh singer Bronwen Lewis recorded a Welsh-language version of Jolene.
The performance eventually reached Dolly’s niece Jada Star, beginning a friendship which led to Star visiting Wales and, ultimately, to Dolly Parton herself recording part of Jolene in Welsh.
What began as a Welsh-language social-media performance had travelled all the way to Nashville.
READ: Dolly Parton Sings Jolene in Welsh →
Hollywood comes to Wales
One of the most extraordinary modern Welsh connections has developed in Wrexham.
When Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney became owners of Wrexham AFC, few could have predicted how deeply the story would resonate around the world.
Their involvement in the football club — and the global success of Welcome to Wrexham — has introduced the city, its people and Welsh culture to an enormous international audience.
It has also attracted an extraordinary collection of famous visitors and supporters to North Wales.
Welsh roots around the world
Millions of people across the world can trace some part of their family history back to Wales.
Welsh emigration created communities across the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and many other countries, leaving family names and cultural traditions that survive generations later.
For some well-known personalities, discovering those Welsh roots has become a story in itself.
Those connections might begin with a surname, an ancestor or a family document.
Sometimes they lead all the way back to a Welsh town, village or valley.
Unexpected Welsh connections
Not every Welsh connection begins with ancestry.
Some come through music. Others through sport, television, film, education, business or history.
Radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi carried out important wireless experiments in Wales.
American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart landed at Burry Port after becoming the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air.
Comedy legends Laurel and Hardy have their own fascinating Welsh associations.
And new connections continue to emerge all the time.
That is what makes this section different.
It is not simply about people who were born in Wales.
It is about the many surprising ways in which Wales has touched lives around the world — and how the wider world continues to find its way back to Wales.
Wales Around the World
Welsh Connections sits alongside our wider Wales Around the World features.
There you can explore the deeper relationships between Wales and individual countries — through migration, culture, sport, business, history and shared communities.
Here, meanwhile, we concentrate on the people behind some of those links.
Some connections stretch back generations.
Others begin with a song, a football club or an unexpected discovery.
Together they provide another reminder that Wales may be a small country, but its connections reach a very long way indeed.
Did Ewe Know?
Welsh settlers established a community in Patagonia, Argentina, in 1865, and Welsh is still spoken there today — one of the most remarkable examples of Welsh culture taking root thousands of miles from home.