Is Jones really a welsh name?

[enfable]

Jones is one of the most (if not the most) common Welsh surnames but there is no J in the welsh alphabet.

How can this be?

[Quizmonster]

'Jones' is just a variant of 'John', which is Hebrew in origin and meaning 'God is gracious'. The actual Welsh equivalent is 'Sion' - pronounced roughly as 'Shawn' - so the letter 'J' is not really necessary to express the name.

[kempie]

The Act of Union (1536) stated that all official documentation in Wales was to be carried out in the English language. This meant that Welsh names were registered in an anglicised form.

The Welsh patronymic system describes family trees in terms of the male line only and records the family association in the 'ap' or 'ab' prefix (ap is a contraction of the Welsh word mab, which means son). So, Rhys ap Dafydd means, in English, Rhys son of David.

Modern Welsh surnames such as Powell, Price and Prichard are the result of this contraction and the tendency to anglicise Welsh names: under the patronymic system they would have been ap Hywel; ap Rhys and ap Richard. The names Bowen and Bevan were derived in the same way.

The range of Welsh surnames is very small, due in part to this drawn-out process of conversion, but also because of the growing tendency to adopt English forenames (usually taken from Christian saints), particularly in towns on the Welsh borders.

Names such as John, William, David, Thomas and Hugh, became Jones, Williams, Davies, Thomas and Hughes.