Owen Griffith (Griffin), Sr. - Parentage / Orgins

This goes back to "How the Welsh Got Their Surnames". They didn't always have them - back before the mid-16th century most of them (originally *all* of them, but some border families got "Englished") used patronymics - "Owen ap Griffith ap Llwyd ab Owen ap...."

Then Henry VIII (of Welsh extraction himself, but his family had gone over to the English pattern generations before) laid down the law that the Welsh were to cut it out and use "proper" surnames like "proper" Englishmen.

This led to various formations - some men just dropped the "ap" between their own name and thier father's name, some kept a vestigial "P" in front of father's name (Price, Prichard, etc.), and some picked a grandfather's or other illustrious relative's instead.

There were a lot of Owens and a lot of Griffiths, so there wound up being a lot of Owen Griffiths (and Griffith Owens too).

I think I see what happened. Somebody equated the Owen Griffith who was the brother of John Griffith (III) MP and attorney-general for North Wales in his own right, with the Owen Griffith who came over to Virginia as an indentured servant. Somebody(Boddie?) was wrong.

https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/g...

Owen the attorney-general can't have been much younger than his brother, as there was political wrangling about his appointment circa 1621-1622. So it's unlikely in the extreme that he wound up a beggared old man who was forced to emigrate as an indentured servant in 1657. (Indentured servitude was, as a rule, a young man's game, and one without rich and powerful relatives to aid him. That went double or more for women.)

Here's some more evidence that they weren't the same person; https://www.ancestry.com/boards/surnames.griffith/2899/mb.ashx

Of especial note: "Adding further to my confusion has been that many Griffins desperately seek to connect our Owen with Owen Griffith of Cefn Amlwch, Caernarvonshire because he was a king's attorney and of royal blood lines, despite the fact that Owen of Cefn Amlwch died without issue and was recorded as still handling legal cases in Wales well after our Owen was residng in VA. Our Owen was known to have arrived here as an indentured servant because his headright was used multiple times to obtain land grants in VA. Our Owen also apparently could not spell his own name, but made a capital "O" as his mark which does not fit with an educated king's attorney."

The Bristol Registers show that he was from Llancadoc [Llangadog - Welsh "c" and "g" interchange very easily] in Carmarthenshire (*not* Caernarvonshire), and left Bristol for Barbados in 1657. (Not everyone who went to Barbados stayed there - some of them, like Owen, pushed on to the Colonies.)