An elderly widow who lived a humble life in West Wales has left £2.6m in her will to her local parish church – decades after she left the village. Hazel Jones-Olszewsk, who grew up in the small village Saron, near Ammanford, was said to be an “ordinary woman” who was careful with her money. Now it has emerged that the widow was sitting on a small fortune, which she has donated entirely to the church where she went to Sunday School – and later had her own prayer mat.
Jones-Olszewsk left her home village in 1991, to live with her son Stansfield in west London.

But St David’s Parish Church, the church she attended as a child right up until she left the village, always held a place in her heart.
After her son’s death in 2009, she bestowed her £2.6m fortune to the church – the largest gift the Church in Wales is believed to have ever received.

Villagers spoke of their surprise that Jones-Olszewsk had such a large fortune hidden away – and had donated it to the church, so many years after leaving.
One local, who didn’t want to be named, said: “She came from a good family but they were by no means wealthy.

“She was a very likeable, ordinary woman when she lived here and it came as quite a shock when we found out how much she had left.”
Locals in Saron believe the money may be an accumulation of the estates of both her late husbands as well as money left to her by her son.

A resident of the village who remembers her growing up said: “It is a vast amount of money for someone who started life with very little.
“I don’t think people are concerned how she came by it, they are just delighted she left it to the church and it will go to the people who she thought deserved it.”
A Church In Wales spokeswoman added: “She was an ordinary woman who did an extraordinary deed in wanting people in the diocese of St David’s to benefit after her death.”

Jones-Olszewsk died in January 2013, four days before her 85th birthday. She had spent her final years living in a care home in Kensington.
After being born in the tiny village in January 1928 to Margaret Ann and James Hughes, she went to Blaenau Primary School and Llandeilo County School, now Llandeilo School.

According to parishioners, she was remembered as a devout churchgoer who left school to work in the ticket office of a local bus company earning less than £5-a-week.
On her 16th birthday, her brother Dennis, a rear gunner in a Lancaster bomber, was shot down over Germany in 1942. He served with the 514 Squadron based in RAF Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire.

She was the seventh of eight children with three elder sisters, Doris, Annie Gwen and Maisie, as well as three elder brothers Melvin, Dennis and Ben. All her siblings predeceased her.

Jones-Olszewsk married clergyman Herry Vernon Jones in her mid-twenties and the couple had their son.
Several years fter her husband died, she married Second World War veteran Mietek Olszewski, from Poland.

They had met years earlier while she had been working in Tregaron Hospital, Tregaron, where he was treated as a patient.
When she was widowed in 1991, Jones-Olszewsk lived with her son in Chelsea, west London.

Just after she moved to a care home in Kensington in 2009, her son died suddenly. She died aged 84 in the nursing home.
According to her will, the two conditions were that the money should stand as a lasting memorial and that the money should be spread across the St David’s Diocese.
In gratitude for Mrs Jones-Olszewsks’s generosity, a plaque commemorating her bequest will be placed at St David’s Church.

A £1m chunk of the gift will be invested in children and young people over three years, while £150,000 will go towards training for clergy and lay ministers.
Church leaders have invited parishes, organisations and individuals to submit ideas as to how much of the money is to be used.
Jones-Olszewek is now buried alongisde her son in Gunnersbury Cemetery, West London. − Daily Mail

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