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Comedian and actor Greg Davies was born on 14 May 1968 in Denbighshire, Wales and is 56 years old.<\/p>
At the start of his episode of Who Do You Think You Are?<\/a><\/em>, Greg says he wants to find out more about his late father\u2019s Welsh ancestry<\/a> and hints about a \u201cDavies secret\u201d.<\/p> At his mother\u2019s house in Shropshire, Greg sees a copy of the birth certificate<\/a> for his grandmother, Edith. No father is listed. Greg realises that his great grandmother, Elizabeth Thomas, had two illegitimate children<\/a> before she was married, \u201cpretty scandalous\u201d for the day. But who was the father?<\/p> The answer to this question arrives when Greg sees old newspapers<\/a> in the archives in Caernarfon, north Wales. These show one William Owen, a butcher, being chased for child maintenance payments. He also turns up in a 1901 news report of his being drunk in charge of a horse and cart \u2013 or, according to one witness, at the very least \u201cmore drunk than sober\u201d.<\/p> William was raised by his maternal grandparents rather than his parents, but why? In Tremadog, William\u2019s birthplace, Greg learns that William\u2019s mother died shortly after her son was born. His farmer father, Evan Owen, left William with his in-laws.<\/p> Evan remarried, but his son seems never to have gone to live with him. Instead, Evan\u2019s life revolved around a new family and religion, as a nonconformist chapel deacon. It\u2019s difficult to know if father and son were in contact, but Evan would certainly have disapproved of Evan\u2019s drinking.<\/p> Greg also learns how Evan met his end, after being thrown from a horse-drawn carriage into a flooded river. There\u2019s even a ghost story associated with the incident.<\/p> Returning to William\u2019s story, Greg heads for Porthmadog, to see the house where his grandmother was born. William, he learns, had two children by different women in the same year, 1907. One of these was a child by Martha Owen, who seems to have been William\u2019s wife.<\/p> Yet more court records reveal that William still wasn\u2019t paying maintenance to support his illegitimate daughters. By 1910, he owed \u00a316, a debt that cost him 14 days in jail. Records also show that William moving south to work as a miner in the coal-mining<\/a> town of Stanleytown.<\/p> It\u2019s research that enables Greg to meet a \u201chalf great aunt<\/a>\u201d he never knew he had, Meirionwen, the last surviving daughter of William and Martha. From Meirionwen, Greg learns that William was a difficult man. At William\u2019s grave, Greg feels little connection.<\/p>