Your story – Heather Scott

Do you have any notable ancestors?

I don’thave any notable ancestors that I know of, but I do have one that had a book written about her or at least about her death, she was murdered, the book was called ‘The Murder of Tyn Tylla’.

She was my grandfathers aunt on my dads side, the family at that time were farming up above the Rhondda Valley area, around the Black Mountains of South Wales. She was working as a maid of some sort for a relative of her mothers and was living at the time at their farm of Tyn Tylla, on a Sunday evening she walked down the mountainside to the village to go to chapel but never arrived, her body was later found, in a wooded area, with her throat cut, apparently so badly that she was nearly decapitated.

Her murderer was never caught but it was thought to be her fiance who also worked at her relatives farm.  He was questioned by police but by all accounts never arrested or tried.  Apparently, he later emigrated to Australia and according to the book someone of his description was seen several months later wandering somewhere in the outback and mumbling to the people that saw him something about killing his fiancee.

According to my father this is the reason the family ended up in the Vale of Glamorgan area as, after her death, some of them left the area including her brother who would have been my grandfather’s father (my great grandfather), and also their parents, my great great grand parents.

My father once told me that there were stories that there was a Lady someone or other in his mother’s family but no one knew anything about her. Several years ago ago I was talking to one of my female cousins, my father’s niece, she was talking about a guided tour her and her husband were taking in a large country house in Somerset. There were several portraits on the walls going up the staircase, as they walked up the stairs they stopped and looked at one and my cousin’s husband said to her that the portrait was the spitting image of her, the guide said that they did not know who the portrait was . My father’s younger brother always said that all of the girls in the family “look like mother”.

I know very little about my mother’s family, her parents died when she was in her early teens, my dad told me that her eldest sister had always said that the family at one time owned an estate but he always thought that she was taking a load of rubbish. After my mum died someone he knew, that he used to see now and again when he went to a local pub, said to him, “you were married to one of the Jones girls weren’t you” then went on to tell him that when he was clearing some things out he found an old South Wales Echo lining a drawer and in it was a story about a member of her family which, piecing things together,we concluded was probably her grandfather. This family member was a bit of a gambler and one day gambled the family estate on the turn of a card and unfortunately lost.  Apparently his sons, of which we assumed one was my mother’s father, all went up to the House of Lords and tried to get it overturned but to no avail and therefore they lost the family estate all on the turn of a card.

My dad’s friend said that the next time they were both at the pub he would give him the paper but unfortunately he died before my dad saw him again and as he hadn’t given any indication of the date of the paper we couldn’t go and look it up in the archives.