'One Hundred Years of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism in America' by The Reverend Daniel Jenkins Williams, PhD., DD., published in 1937
Daniel Jenkins Williams and his siblings were the third generation of a Welsh-American family in rural Wisconsin. Their grandparents had emigrated from Anglesey in 1846 with their father, then a two-year-old. Most of the Welsh settlers of Waukesha County (there were a few hundred) arrived during that decade; they were for the most part literate, farmers, and devout Calvinist Methodists, with little education beyond their astonishing knowledge of the Bible. Daniel's grandparents and parents spoke Welsh at home, and over the decades worked their farm, Glandyffryn (purchased from the government) from subsistence into prosperity. But the third generation – while still returning as young adults each summer to help with the harvest – chose not to become farmers. By 1895 Daniel was both an ordained Welsh Calvinist Minister and an entering freshman at the University of Wisconsin. Following graduate school, he attended Union Theological Seminary in New York for three years, then reversed his grandparents' trip across the sea, to study at Oxford University and to meet his "old country" relatives. He was a gifted orator, in English and in Welsh. Preaching in Welsh he so impressed his new acquaintances in Anglesey that they offered him a Taith (a preaching tour) during his Christmas holidays.
His career as a Presbyterian minister began, when he returned to Wisconsin, in north woods lumber mill towns. He subsequently held pastorates in Columbus, Ohio, in Oshkosh and Wausau in Wisconsin, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and again in Columbus and Wausau. He served as a winter pastor in a succession of little churches throughout Florida. "With his coming," his son wrote, "every church to which he ministered entered a period of growth and intensified activity".
