Welsh Chapels and Churches Photo Image Library
Croeso/Welcome
In the beginning, this website presented photographs that I had collected by purchase or had photographed by my husband or myself, in the course of my Welsh family history research. The website grew as many members of the Glamorgan and Dyfed Rootsweb Mailing Lists, in particular, offered their photos to add to mine. These along with many others provided by friends and visitors to this site, have made this site grow in size. To everyone of those contributors I owe my sincere thanks.
About this website
At present these chapel photos mainly cover parts of Glamorgan, and a few from Montgomeryshire and Pembrokeshire, but with help I hope will soon expand. The County buttons use Chapman County Codes, which can be seen here. The pictures, which will enlarge, are arranged more or less alphabetically by place name.
I do not live in Wales now, and therefore have accepted that the names of the chapels and church photographs are named correctly by the contributors when given to me. If you happen to disagree with a place name please let me know and I shall do my best to correct this.
It is a depressing sight to see so many of these chapels, once almost heaving with people singing praises to the Lord, falling into disuse and deterioration. These are the buildings where once our ancestors prayed, married, and baptised their children. Here were the places of learning, evening classes, and Sunday Schools. Here prizes were given out and Sunday School outings and trips arranged.
Sadly many of these chapels are very large and cannot easily be converted into homes, as they have in some areas. Conversion of large chapels into Community Centres like that of Soar, Penygraig, Rhondda is something to be applauded, but obviously there can be only one community centre in a village/township. Our ancestors could not have conceived that these large buildings that they raised money for would one day, all too soon, be of little value and become burdensome on their communities.
Copyright restrictions
Images sent to me by a contributor are regarded by me as their copyright and their name as a contributor is added to the Credit page. It must be clearly understood that once sent to me and uploaded onto the website, that these photographs are there for others to share and to offer sights of places of religion which played such an important part in the lives of our ancestors.
Although many hours of my time have been and are being put into the building and maintenance of the website, and sharing these photographs, my idea in having these images available on the internet was a purely altruistic one, to help others easily discover what their ancestors' chapel or church looked/s like.
You are therefore free to save and use any of the images we have produced, However, if you wish to publish them, for example in a book, on a CD-Rom, or on the Internet, you may do so, with the proviso that you acknowledge this website.
Please do not infringe other people's copyright by sending images which have been taken from another website or from a published book etc. Please do not feel that these images, because they are offered in good faith, may be copied and used in any publication, or sold on the internet or in any published book form. They are though offered to family historians for their family histories.
Disclaimer
To the best of my knowledge, all these pictures are free of any copyright restrictions. If you think this is not so then please feel free to contact me.
Contributions
If you have any church or chapel photos which are not shown, and are owned by you, or earlier ones of those converted or demolished, I will be very happy to have copies of these to include in this website. Due credit will be given. Details of how to contribute are here.
Jill Muir