Homage
A Lloyd Jones Family History
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Section 1: Contents & Introductions
Section 3: The Lloyd Jones Family Pages
Section 5: Hillside Home School
Welcome to Homage, a compilation of Lloyd Jones family history that starts in Wales and carries our immediate ancestral line of Richard and Mary “Mallie” Jones to America and Wisconsin.
In this potpourri of writings, we concentrate on the first and second generations who, despite cold, drought, accident, illness and all the unexpected vicissitudes of immigrant and pioneer life, successfully impacted the land and people around them and the generations who followed them.
Once in America they became “Lloyd Joneses”, a name that combined their Welsh gentry scholarship (Lloyd) with their Thomas and Jones farming skills and emigrant derring-do.
The search for facts was eclectic: to the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison; to the Lloyd Jones collection in Dodgeville, WI’s Iowa County Historical Society; to the Taliesin West archives in Scottsdale, Arizona; to land deeds and hundred-year-old newspaper stories, to the memories of those still living ... and always, to the letters, diaries, and sermons of our forebears.
Here you have a collection of essays, research, and family lore accrued over a multi-decade quest in both Wales and Wisconsin. Writers include university dons, historians, family essayists, Welsh experts. Family writings are identified by generation and author with Richard and Mary (Mallie Thomas) being generation 1. Where essays exist without a name they are “stitchings”— an effort on my part to “stitch” together context between different authors.
As the collector, I completely trust our writers’ scholarship and expertise, but cannot absolutely vouch for their sources. As we have discovered in recent years, some of our most poignant family stories have turned out to be flat wrong. Still, those few contretemps are far overwhelmed by the mass of otherwise easily-lost memories that preserve our history and inspire our future.
Now is the time to share. Topics include our Welsh heritage, immigration, essays on each first and second generation family member, Unity Chapel, the original Hillside Home School, and life in that little pocket of Wisconsin that Maginel Wright Barney lovingly termed “The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses.” The Unity Chapel website seems a logical way to dispense this family research.
You may read it at leisure or print it. The only caveat is that any writings of yours give ample credit to the researcher you are quoting. Please honor all copyrights by requesting permission from the author or publisher to use the text.
Thankfully, some of our ancestors wrote diaries (Thomas, Enos, Jenkin), books (Youngest Son, Chester; The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses, Maginel), or reminiscences (Anna, Jennie, Ed). And oh those reminiscent sermons! (Jenkin, Tom Graham, Megan Lloyd Joiner.) Without those our information would be meager.
One of the most astonishing gifts of this compilation is the number of highly respected authors and historians who have willingly approved the use of their words for this tome as long as copyright restrictions are followed).
Chief among them are:
Wales: Jonathan Adams, David Russell Barnes, Simon Evans, Evan James, John Jenkins
Wisconsin: Mary Jane Hamilton, John Metcalf, Christopher Barney, Douglas Hadley, Keiran Murphy, Bryan Walton
Family Historians: Richard “Jix” Lloyd Jones, Thomas Graham, Richard (Dick) Thomas, Janis Nelson, Mary E. Frederickson, Judith Hayner, John P. Lewis, Robert Humphries, Georgia Snoke, and all those who contributed to decades of Unity Chapel newsletter articles.
Other, major sources include family writings from deceased members whose works, written in the past, had the same goal in mind—collecting known facts to send to the Lloyd Jones descendants of the future. We therefore honor Lucy Lloyd Theakston and John Davies of Wales, Jane Lloyd-Jones, Maginel Wright Barney; Anna Lloyd Wright, Chester Lloyd-Jones, Thomas E. Jones; Helen (Kin) Lloyd Jones and her husband Jeff Jeffries; Richard Lloyd Jones (generation 3), Jenkin Lloyd Jones (generation 4).
Photos in this compilation were found in Lloyd-Jones Family albums at the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives in Madison, the Iowa County Historical Society — Lloyd Jones collection in Dodgeville,WI, the Frederickson Album, the Franklin Porter “Frank Lloyd Wright” photo collection, the Anna Speier-Forster Album, the Cecil Smith Album (copyrighted) at the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives; the Hugenholtz Album from the Netherlands; the James Family Album, courtesy of Kelly Campion and Mary E. Frederickson, photos given to the author by Oskar Muñoz and Bruce Pfeiffer at Taliesin West, and personal photos belonging to the Richard Lloyd Jones family.
May you find here the story of valiant men and women who touch our lives to this day. I have come to know that first and second generation better than some of my own kin. Enjoy them. Learn from them. Thank them. We owe them more than we — or they — could have imagined.
Georgia Lloyd Jones Snoke (Jenkin line, Generation 5) July 2026