The history of the Pryce-Jones name

Both halves of the name are deeply Welsh, and both began as patronymics — names formed from the name of a father rather than a fixed, inherited surname.

"Pryce" is a corruption of the Welsh "Ap Rhys" — "son of Rhys". Rhys is an old Welsh personal name long associated with the sense of ardour or fiery zeal. In the older Welsh tradition a person was known by their father's name; as fixed surnames spread, the p of ap fused onto Rhys to give the settled surnames Price and Pryce. It is exactly the pattern behind other familiar Welsh names — Powell from ap Hywel, Pritchard from ap Richard.

"Jones" derives from "John" and is among the most widespread surnames in all of Wales. It too began as a patronymic — "John's son" — before hardening into a hereditary family name. That two such characteristically Welsh names sit together in Pryce-Jones is itself a small portrait of the country's naming history.

The surname Price/Pryce is found throughout Wales and the border counties of England. Because it is so common, it appears very often in compound — or "double-barrelled" — form, paired with other widespread Welsh surnames such as Jones and Thomas. This is the origin of names like Price-Jones, Pryce-Jones and Price-Thomas: a compound was a practical way to mark out one family among the many that shared a single, abundant Welsh name.

Throughout this archive the name is always written with its hyphen and is never broken across two lines, because the two halves belong together as a single family name.

In this family the compound surname goes back to Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920), whose story has a dedicated page in this archive. Until his knighthood, in 1887, the name was written "Pryce Jones", without the hyphen; from then on it is settled as Pryce-Jones, the hyphenated form carried by this branch of the family ever since.

The best-documented figure to carry the name is Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920), born on 16 October 1834 in Llanllwchaiarn, near Newtown, in the old county of Montgomeryshire. From a draper's shop in Newtown he built a business that reached customers across the world by post — and the Pryce Jones catalogue of 1861 is recognised as the first mail-order catalogue in the world.

It is worth keeping three dates apart: he began sending Welsh flannel by post in 1859; the famous catalogue dates from 1861; and the Royal Welsh Warehouse building beside Newtown's railway station opened later, in 1879. He was knighted in 1887 — and it was then that the family name took its hyphen.

His full story has a dedicated page in this archive.

The documented origins of the family lie in Mid Wales, in what was the county of Montgomeryshire (today part of Powys), and in particular around Newtown in the valley of the River Severn. This was a landscape of small market towns, hill farms and, above all, of the Welsh woollen and flannel trade — the very trade that would carry the family name out into the wider world.

Over the generations, members of the family left Mid Wales and settled in other countries. Today relatives bearing the Pryce-Jones name live across the United Kingdom and overseas.

The branch of the family that keeps this archive followed a particular path: from Wales to Argentina and, later, to Chile. According to family memory and the family's own records, the early stages of that migration settled in Buenos Aires, and a later generation moved on to Chile, where the family lives today. The exact dates of each move are not confirmed against archival documents.

This archive is maintained by Gerald Pryce-Jones, who lives in Chile. According to the family's own genealogical tree — in particular the research gathered by one of Gerald's uncles — this branch descends from Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones, the founder of the Royal Welsh Warehouse, through the following line:

• Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920), of Newtown, Wales.
• Albert Westhead Pryce-Jones, son of Sir Pryce, born on 26 May 1870 in Newtown.
• Robert Douglas Nugent Pryce-Jones, son of Albert Westhead, born in the early twentieth century. The family tree holds contradictory details about his birth, which the family has still to clarify.
• Reginaldo Roberto Pryce-Jones, son of Robert Douglas Nugent, born on 6 March 1940 in Buenos Aires and died on 8 November 2010 in the same city.
• Alan Roberto Pryce-Jones, son of Reginaldo and father of Gerald.
• Gerald Pryce-Jones, who created and maintains this archive.

It matters to be clear about the nature of this information: the chain of descent comes from the family's own memory and records, not from archival documents verified link by link. The family holds this line as its handed-down history; it will be checked against documentary records as those become available.