Assimilation and the Vanishing Welsh

In 1880, the Rev. William Davies Evans visited Philadelphia, PennsylIvania. He noted that while the ‘Welsh influence was very strong here at one time’, the descendants of the early Welsh settlers ‘are 100 per cent American by now’. This Americanisation process occurred in all areas with Welsh populations. The Welsh arrived in Ohio long after they had settled in Philadelphia, but the pattern was the same. In 1913, the Rev. Daniel Jenkins Williams published The Welsh of Columbus, Ohio: A Study in Adaptation and Assimilation. In a chapter that he entitled ‘The Vanishing Welsh’, he noted: Each of these [Ohio]