Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1-2026

Department

Department of Social Sciences

Abstract

Today, when searching for information about the Welsh in early America, two dominant, but false, narratives quickly emerge both online and in books and exhibitions: that the Welsh Prince Madoc discovered America, resulting in a legacy of ‘Welsh Indians’, and that sixteen signers of the Declaration of Independence were Welsh. Using primary and secondary sources, we contextualize both of these myths and discuss their development and impacts upon Welsh-American heritage. Eighteen separate signers of the Declaration (the list of sixteen is never complete, nor identical) have been attributed with Welsh ancestry through social media, popular news sources, popular history books, and Welsh heritage societies. Only six signers have such links supported by evidence, including the Welsh-speaking Francis Lewis. Francis Lewis’s capture in 1756 by “Native Auxiliaries that spoke a language similar to Welsh” further highlights intersections between the Madoc Myth, which falsely claims Welsh influence over Indigenous cultural and technological development, and the settler-colonial foundations of the nation reflected in the Welsh Founding Fathers. Just as recent works highlighted the settler colonial dystopia of the supposed Patagonian Welsh utopia, this exhibition provides an evidence-rooted complication to the often-glossy narratives of peaceful Welsh Quakers as bystanders to the American experiment.

Publisher's Statement

Declaring Welshness  © 2025 by Emily Ormsbee, Perry Mesloh, Mark Alan Rhodes II, Sarah Fayen Scarlett, Steven A. Walton, and Andrew Jacobson is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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