England and Wales Genealogy Resources and Information

• 1837 - Present: Since 1837 all births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales have had to be registered at the register office in the district where the event took place, while for Scotland the start date is 1855 and for Ireland it was 1864 for births & deaths and 1845 for marriages (though many Irish records were destroyed in 1922).
• FreeBMD project, whose goal is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free internet access to these transcriptions.
• FamilySearch Labs now has index information for England baptisms (1700-1900) and marriages (1700-1900) with more records coming.
• Overview of the Registration Districts in England and Wales (1837-1974).
• "Online Parish Clerk" projects are individually run projects which aim to extract and preserve the records from the various parishes (along with other data) and to provide online access to that data, FREE of charge. The Lancashire project includes a nice list of all the current projects; go to the page and click on "links" on the left side.   
• FreeREG is a companion web-site to the FreeBMD site already mentioned - sharing the same purpose of making transcribed baptism, marriage and burial (from both parish and non-conformist registers) available to be freely searched on the internet. It includes records for England, Wales and Scotland
• .GENUKI Directory of UK genealogy-related material. You can browse at the county level for a pretty comprehensive overview of what materials might help your search in that particular county.
• Non-conformist (e.g., Methodists, Wesleyans, Baptists, Independents, Protestant Dissenters, Congregationalist, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Quakers, Dissenters, Catholics, Russian Orthodox, etc.)? (read the complete piece).Some 'dissenters' still considered themselves part of the Church of England and, in many cases they continued to use their parish church for the rites of baptism, marriage, and burial. In 1754, after Hardwicke's Marriage Act, only clergyman of the Church of England could perform marriages. However, Quakers and Jews were exempted. Some Anglican vicars refused to bury an unbaptised person, which can result in the establishment of a separate burial ground or burial on unconsecrated ground. After 1837, non-conformist records were recorded as above.
  Non-conformist registers are just coming online at the www.BMDRegisters.co.uksite (in association with the UK National Archives).
  

Aberdale, Glamorganshire, Wales

Thomas Price Jones and his wife Mary Williams lived in an area of south Wales called the Cynon Valley which lies in the county borough of Rhonnda Cynon Taf. They probably lived in the towns of Aberdale and/or Aberaman. Their church was in Aberdare.

Thomas was a coal miner and probably worked at the Aberaman Ironworks, as at least one of his children was born there. The map and quoted text below are from the Rhonnda Cynon Taf website.

"Aberaman Ironworks were the last of the four ironworks in the Cynon Valley to be built. Founded by Crawshay Bailey in 1845 the first iron was puddled at Aberaman Colliery in May 1847. In 1848 the works had one working blast furnace, three engines, a forge, rolling and boring mills, brickworks and limekilns.
The works did not, however, prove successful in the long term. By 1854 they were out of blast although they were started again in 1855. A first attempt had been made to sell the works in 1862 for £250,000, but this appears to have been unsuccesful as the works were again put up for sale in 1864 following the retirement of Crawshay Bailey. The works were bought by the Aberaman Iron Company, although this company was wound up in 1867 when the whole concern was bought by the Powell Duffryn Company. The works had stopped in 1866 and were never again put into blast."

Further Reading:
Wikipedia article on Aberdare