"It happened that our family grew from eight to eleven of us during the summer of 1967. Three foster sons joined our five sons and one daughter. So we had nine children to take on holiday. We had always camped with our own six children, but with three more boys to look after, keeping clothes dry on camping holidays in Wales was a mammoth task!

We were looking at ideas for a different sort of holiday when we heard of a derelict farm-house near Machynlleth, so we went to see it. The house was very delapidated, and there were no services of any kind. There were holes in the roof, a buzzard was using a cupboard for his roost, cattle had been inside, and large fungi were growing on the inside walls. In spite of all those difficulties, we could see that it would be possible for it to become a very basic sort of holiday home.

We took the place on and began to restore it. We carried the water from the well in a big yellow dustbin, and had oil lamps for lighting. Gradually we made the house fit for holidays, with a big pot-bellied stove for warmth and drying the clothes. The children had wonderful times playing in the countryside, and as they grew older and helped with the work, they learned D.I.Y. skills from their father. By 1985, Caeheulon was quite civilised, with a new roof, electricity, and the phone, and my husband Alan and I moved in permanently.

All the time that we were working on the old house, I kept thinking of the people that had lived here. We knew that the Sunday School had been held in the old farmhouse kitchen from 1844 onwards, where the pupils, adults as well as children, learned the scriptures, and their written Welsh. We had found papers and postcards and clues in the rubbish, and I determined to find out about the people and the area, so that our children would have a better understanding of our little corner of Wales.

Mary Davies of Dyffryn, Aberhosan, had photographs and papers which she kindly lent to me. Her grandfather had been born at Caeheulon. This all gave me a good start. The house is in the parish of Penegoes, which includes the villages of Aberhosan, Penegoes, and part of Dylife. I began by writing a short general history of the parish.

I then spent a lot of time at the National Library of Wales, looking at parish and estate records and censuses, and was gradually able to make a family tree. The Lewis/Morgan family had lived in the house for at least fourteen generations! As I noticed children from that family had married into other families, I found out about those families as well.

After some years, I realised that I had the details of over a hundred houses in the parish of Penegoes, so I decided to continue the work and find out as much about the rest of the houses in the parish as I could, and collected parochial and nonconformist records and censuses up to 1891. This was all done in longhand, so it took a long time.

When the results were collated, there were details of more than 250 houses, all listed under each house or hamlet name. I had realised by then that a lot of people would be interested in the results of my research, so I waited for the 1901 census, and collected that for every house before finishing.

The book is called Caeheulon and the Parish of Penegoes. It has been published by local countryside publishers, Coch-y-Bonddu Books, owned and run by my eldest son, Paul - so what started out as a few interesting details in a leaflet for our children, has turned into a real book!"

Written by Wendy Morgan.