President Obama is the first POTUS, in office, to visit Wales

[frazzled]

6. Even my family has the Welsh connection

My husband's father (whom I never knew; he had died before I met my husband) was born in Wales before the family immigrated to the US. That might not seem remarkable, but it always seemed odd to our family, for he came from a family of Russian Jews.

Recently, my daughter was doing genealogy research, and discovered in a 1901 census the town in which the family had settled--Brynmawr. And that led me to read that there was in fact a large Jewish immigration to Wales in the late 19th century, something I'd never known. Indeed, according to the article below, "Brynmawr, according to the statistical unit of the Board of Deputies, at one time had the largest concentration of Jews in proportion to the British Isles." Who knew!

http://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/community/wales/How_Greeners_came_to_the_valley.htm

I've never been there, but my daughter traveled around the country for a week when she was in high school, and even took Welsh lessons so she could speak a bit of the language.