EVERY old churchyard cemetery has emotive tombstone dedications to the deceased, and the parish church of St Justinian’s is no different.

One is to eight-year-old Mary Morgan who died 9th August 1819. Her tombstone is being slowly wrapped, almost protectively, by the huge, particularly ancient Yew tree in the cemetery that is considered by those who know about such things, to be about eight hundred years old, making it older than the famous ‘Bleeding Yew’ to be found in the churchyard at Nevern.

But the headstone that I want, on this occasion, to bring to your attention, is to Rebecca Cousins, who died aged sixteen on July 19 1859. The inscription, with difficulty still legible, reads ‘I was a flower, fresh and green/ Soon cut and no more seen/ In love I lived, in peace I died/I asked for life but God denied.

There is much more to Rebecca, who lies next to her mother, Emily, and her family than might be thought from reading her tombstone. Beryl Davies, who died two years ago, left a superb legacy in her book ‘Freystrop & Folk’.

In this, Beryl researched the quite remarkable suggestion that Brigham Young (1801-1877), who became the leader of the Mormons/Church of Latter-Day Saints, after the death of the founder of the movement, Joseph Smith (1805-1844), had had a close connection with Freystrop.

The suggestion had come partly from members of the coal mining, entrepreneurial Harcourt Roberts family who resided at Little Milford House from the late 19th century until the last member, a good friend of mine named Erica Harcourt Roberts, died in 2012.

Erica’s mother in law, another Mrs Harcourt Roberts, suggested that it was well known, that Brigham Young had stayed in Little Milford House whilst preaching in the area, in the middle of the 19th century, but Beryl Davies knew of an even stronger tradition that he had been born in Freystrop and was a member of her family.

There was even, apparently, a cottage in Little Milford Wood named Brigham Young Cottage.

I have noticed the surname of Young on some of the cemetery tombstones but have yet to come across the ruins of a cottage carrying his name.

Beryl attempted to research the matter further but met only dead ends. It does indeed appear that Brigham Young and his father were born in the New England state of Vermont.

Despite this legend not being proven, Beryl uncovered a parallel link which involved the family of Rebecca Cousins.

Rebecca was one of seven children to Moses and Emily Cousins. Her eldest sister, Martha, had married a cousin, John Cousins, against her parents wishes and after hearing a Mormon sermon in Haverfordwest, in the mid 1850s she and her new husband travelled to America on a boat loaded with other converts.

Following this, Emily died in 1857 and Moses remarried, but the remaining siblings disliked his new wife, and in 1865 another of the sisters, Letitia married another Mormon, William Williams, part of a Mormon missionary body in west Wales and they too left for the states.

Overcome with the loss of members of their family and the departure of others, two of the remaining girls, eighteen-yearold Elizabeth and seventeenyear-old Mary Anne, crept out of their home at night and left for the states to find their sisters and become Mormons. Beryl Davies tells us that Elizabeth’s daughter visited Freystrop in 1963 at the age of ninety and left an account of her mother’s quite remarkable journey and experiences in Utah and Idaho after eventually arriving there.

The hand-written account has been apparently lodged in the Pembrokeshire Archives and I will let you know at some point in the future when I have viewed it.

There is currently however, history that is being made now which is relevant to the area of St Justinian’s Church and Little Milford Wood and which will be talked about for many years to come. More next week.