Soldiers' wills online - good news (up to a point)

Will Form in a soldier's pass book 1945

As reported in the Guardian and on the BBC, the long-awaited collection release of soldiers' wills is at last being released by HM Courts and Tribunals Service. Like most other genealogists I am delighted that the Probate Service has finally made some data available online, but I'm afraid that as it stands, the service leaves a great deal to be desired.

On the positive side, they have provided an online index to some of their records, which is something that the General Register Office for England and Wales has yet to achieve. And at long last it is now possible to pay by credit or debit card, a particularly welcome move for overseas searchers. Also, the range of years covered, 1850 to 1986, starts 8 years before the Principal Probate Registry, and continues 20 years after the most recent calendars from the main collection, online at Ancestry.co.uk.

So far, so good, but there is still a long way to go. First of all, unless you use the link from one of the news stories, the introductory search page might be hard to find, since it is not in the Probate Service part of the HM Courts and Tribunals Service site, but in the Death and Bereavement area of GOV.UK. The Courts and Tribunals site is due to be merged into GOV.UK, so this confusion should only be temporary. The information, or lack of it, on the search page is of much more concern.

The introductory page gives only the coverage dates (1850-1986) and:

     You will need: 

• the soldier’s last name and year of death to search for a will 
• to register for the service with an email address 
• to pay £6 to access a will

Regrettably it does not tell you that only the years 1914 to 1921 are included in the initial launch, or indeed give any indication that the collection is incomplete. Nor is there any background information whatsoever.

There are both basic (surname and year) and advanced search functions, but both searches will only allow you to search a single year at a time, there is no facility to search a range of years. The extra fields in Advanced Search are: Forename, Month of Death, Day of Death and Regimental Number. I don't know how or why these criteria were chosen, but they are not the ones I would have picked. For an ancestor who died in the two World Wars the exact date and regimental number can easily be found on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site, but outside of these time periods you are unlikely to know these details, although you might know the man's regiment, or at least be able to hazard a guess. As it stands, searching for the will of a man with a common name could prove very expensive at £6 a time, with only a name, year and number. This is much less information than is provided in the regular probate calendars.

A regular calendar entry (which include wills and administrations of some soldiers who died in the World Wars) might read as follows:

COLEMAN Reginald John of 36 Trewsbury Road, Sydenham, Kent, lance-corporal 36th Machine Gun Company died 19 June 1917 in France or Belgium, Probate London  30 October to Frederick Vincent Buckhurst, bank inspector and Edward Ffoulkes Jones, commercial clerk. Effects £3433 5s 3d

If this had been one of those in the newly-released collection, his entry would simply read:

COLEMAN Reginald John 71482 19 June 1917

The search page contains a link at the top 'Beta: This is a new service - your feedback will help us to improve it' and I can only suggest that anyone who is interested in these wills gives the site a thorough road test and feeds back their own opinions and suggestions.

For St Paddy's Day: your Irish ancestors in The National Archives - in England!

Tracing your Irish ancestry isn't easy, but it might not be as hard as you think. Sometimes you need to look in places where you might not have thought of looking, and one of those places is in England, In The National Archives at Kew, to be precise. Although probate, census and vital records will be held in Ireland (when they survive) for many other purposes Ireland was part of the United Kingdom until less than a century ago. This means that there is lots of information on Irish people in records that were created on a UK-wide basis.

Soldiers, sailors and more

Many Irishmen served in the British Army, and a lot of records are now online, on Ancestry.co.uk for the First World War, and on Findmypast.co.uk for earlier records, back to the 18th century. Many others were in the Royal Navy or the Royal Marines and their service records have also been digitised, and you will find them on The National Archives website among the Online collections. There are several guides on how to research men (and women) in all of the armed services on the Looking for a person page.

Other services

Apart from the armed forces you might find your Irish ancestor serving in the merchant navy, Coastguard or Customs and Excise. You won't find detailed service records like those you might hope to find for the armed forces, but you can still piece together details of their lives and trace their movements, which can point you in the direction of more clues. Tracing merchant seaman can be tricky, but it has become a lot easier since some records have been put online by Findmypast.co.uk  There are no online records for customs and excise officers, but there are some coastguard records on Digital Microfilm You still have to look through the microfilm to find what you want, but instead of putting a roll of film on a reader, you can download it as a PDF file and click your way through.


Irish records

Perhaps surprisingly, there are several collections that relate specifically to Ireland, notably the records of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Some of these are on microfilm, and should eventually be digitised and put online. There is also an interesting set of records for the Irish Reproductive Loan Fund in record series T 91. The fund provided loans at interest to the industrious poor, who had to provide some form of security for the loan. Some of these records have been digitised and indexed and can be downloaded free of charge from Moving Here. They consist of the Returns to the Clerk of the Peace for the counties of Cork, Galway, Limerick, Mayo, Roscommon and Tipperary.

CO 762/48 Application of JohnScanlon 

There is a surprising amount of material from the early 20th Century, although most can only be consulted as original documents. Applications to the Irish Grants Committee from people who had claims against either the British or Irish governments are indexed by name and place in record series CO 762. There is a collection of passport applications - only a single box, unfortunately - from 1921, some with photographs. These are part of the major collection known as the Dublin Castle Records in CO 904, dealing with the British administration in Ireland from 1795, and there are similar records in CO 906.

Those are just a few highlights, and there are plenty more, mostly under-explored. But just to give you an idea of what you might find, I know exactly where and when one of my Irish ancestors, William Charlton was born - in 1785, before the start of parish records there - through the records of his service in the British Army.

Happy St Paddy's Day, and happy hunting. I hope that the luck of the Irish comes your way.  

The War of 1812 - from the British side

Today is the anniversary of day the British Army marched into Washington DC and burned a lot of it, including the White House. The War of 1812 is an important milestone in American history, but doesn't f eature so prominently on this side of the Atlantic (sorry USA, but Britain was more concerned with the Napoleon, the enemy on the doorstep).

Proper historians in the USA, Canada and the UK have researched the events of 1812-1815 and written plenty of books about it. I can't compete with them, but a couple of weeks ago I gave a talk about some of the records of the war that can help genealogists. To be more precise, I was talking about records held in The National Archives, and there are lots of them, including plenty about the men who fought on the American side, not just the British.

The podcast of the talk was uploaded to the website earlier today - how's that for timing? I illustrated it with some documents, including the one below, the service of record of John Adams, an American from Philadelphia who served in the British Army.

From his physical description (on the second extract) it looks as though he was an African American. There are a few more of these, but most of the records relating to Americans are about the several thousand who were taken prisoner. Most of these are lists of names, some with more detail than others. This one is a list of American prisoners who were fever patients, taken from a Royal Navy surgeon's journal.

In a few cases you might find a detailed account of a poor American soldier or sailor who was not only unlucky enough to be captured, but was sick as well.

Many American genealogists are unaware of these records, but when they do see them they are pretty impressed. Better still, the names of the American prisoners from 1812 to 1815 are name-indexed, although unfortunately the index is not online. Oh well, maybe one day.

Digital microfilm - the Army List, free online

Army List 1787

If you are researching an officer in the British Army one of the first sources you want to look at is the printed Army List. This is an annual, and sometimes more frequent, publication listing all the officers, arranged by regiment (I should now apologise to military specialists for a gross over-simplification of what the Army List is about, but you know what genealogists are like, we just love lists of names). It is available in major libraries, and some volumes have been published on CD, or are available on commercial websites.

A run of volumes from 1754 to 1879 has now been made available for free download on the Digital Microfilm section of DocumentsOnline, in record series WO 65. There is a separate pdf file for each volume, and they can take a long time to download so you need a good broadband connection. But they are definitely worth the wait; this is not just a scanned version of the printed lists that you may have seen in a library, but the set from the War Office library. Each volume was bound with alternate printed and blank sheets, to allow for hand annotations of commissions, promotions etc during the year.

Honble Arthur Wesley's first commission

The example here is a page from the 1787 volume, which shows the very first appearance of the Duke of Wellington in an Army List. He received his first commission as ensign in the 73rd Regiment of Foot on 7 March 1787, and his name is crossed out because in December of the same year he was transferred to the newly-formed 76th Regiment. Before he was created the 1st Duke of Wellington, his name was Arthur Wellesley, but he appears here as the Honble. Arthur Wesley, the original spelling of the name.

I have no family connections in the officer class in the period covered by these lists (my ancestor who fought in the Peninsular War was one of the 'poor bloody infantry'), but I wish I did, because this a great resource.

Hidden treasure - Digital microfilm update

Since my last post on the subject, several extra record series have been added to the no-frills 'Digital microfilm' section of DocumentsOnline.
You could be forgiven for not noticing this, since the introductory page for digital microfilm does not list the new records yet - because there are so many new additions, this needs to be completely re-written.

To find and download a file, you need to identify the reference for the piece that you want using the Catalogue. Then go to DocumentsOnline and type the reference in the 'Quick search' box, press 'Go' and then follow the instructions. You might want to go and make a cup of tea, walk the dog or do some laundry while the file downloads, unless you have a super-duper fast broadband connection, because the files can be very large, sometimes amounting to hundreds of pages. Worth it, though.

Here are some of the new records that have been added, that may be of interest to genealogists:

ADM 171 Navy department medal rolls

FO 611 Indexes of passport holders

HO 9 Convict hulk registers

HO 11 Convict transportation registers

HO 40 Home Office disturbances correspondence

HO 52 Home Office counties correspondence and papers

WO 116 Army out-pensioners admission books

The National Archives reference: WO 116/1

WO 117 Army length of service pension admission books

Enjoy

Sentimental Sunday - Robert Collins 1927-1983

Today would have been my dad's 84th birthday. As you can see from the dates above, he didn't make it past 55 (he died in January, and his birthday was June). So I thought today would be a good day to write a post about him.

Like most other British men of his generation, he was called up for National Service. He served in the army, working as a storeman in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. When he enlisted in 1945 at the age of 18 he was just over 5ft 4in tall, with a chest measurement of 33in, and weighed only 115lbs!

All these details are in his army pass book, which I still have. Fortunately the wee girl who scribbled on it (who, me?) used a pencil, so I was able to remove the marks with a soft eraser. One of the pages in the pass book is the standard will form that soldiers were required to complete, so it contains his signature, and those of two witnesses. I wonder if C Thompson and G Cruickshank of the Seaforth Highlanders are still alive?

Dad spent much of his time at Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt, and my mother still has some pictures of him there, complete with camels, pyramids etc. Because he was in the army from 1945 to 1947, he didn't see any active service, unlike one of his younger brothers who served in Korea. He mostly had a pretty good time, and enjoyed his work. He told me about some of the perks of working in stores, such as having two sets of kit - the set you actually wore, and a second set, brushed, pressed and polished to perfection to be produced for kit inspections!

This is one of my favourite pictures of him, relaxing on his bunk and enjoying a beer. He looks equally happy in the other pictures that we have from his time in Egypt.

He sometimes wondered if he should have made a career in the army, and perhaps learned a trade. In civilian life he had no qualifications, unless you count the possession of a driving licence. He would have made a good engineer, or electrician, or something similar. He was always very practical, and good at DIY and tinkering with cars, and so on.

But I'm glad he didn't stay in the army, because then he might not have met my mother, and I wouldn't be here! He died before I started doing family history in earnest, so I never got to share any of my finds with him. I'm sure he would have been interested, and would have given me even more information. But I did ask him about his family while I was in my early teens, and some of what he told me came in very handy. I still miss him, and I think about him every day.

Not just Chelsea Pensioners

The results of a recent Friends of The National Archives project has been added to the online Catalogue. This is good news for the genealogist, as the project was the indexing of the discharge documents of more than 20,000 soldiers, held at Kilmainham Hospital in Dublin (series WO 119). Kilmainham administered the records of these out-pensioners until 1822, after which they became the responsibility of the better-known Chelsea Hospital. Many of the men are Irish, or from Irish regiments, but you will find plenty who had no obvious connection with Ireland.

The Chelsea Pensioners' Records (series WO 97) have already been digitised and indexed on Findmypast.co.uk and eventually these Kilmainham records will be onlinethere too. In the meantime this major addition to the Catalogue will make it much easier to track down some of our soldier ancestors.

It is worth noting that there are other sources for soldiers beyond the wonderful online Chelsea Pensioners' records; they will soon be joined by a series of attestation records for the militia 1806-1915 (series WO 96). There is also another set of discharge documents of Chelsea Pensioners (series WO 121), much of which has also been indexed in the Catalogue, again by the Friends of The National Archives, and the records are on microfilm at Kew. This is well worth a look if you fail to find someone in the WO 97 records. This is where I found one of my own ancestors, William Charlton, who fought in the Peninsular War. He was a private in the 74th (Highland) Regiment of Foot and was pensioned following the battle of Fuentes D'Onoro in 1811, where he received a gunshot wound to the jaw. If, like me, you are a fan of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books, Sharpe's Battle is the one that describes this particularly bloody episode.

WO 121/126

These early records don't give as much information as some later ones, but I was still able to find out quite a bit about him. The document itself told me his age and birthplace, that his former trade was labourer, and gave a physical description; he had black hair, dark eyes. and I was surprised to find how tall he was, 5 feet 11 inches. Once I had found him in the pension records, knowing his regiment and dates of service meant that I could look in the regimental muster book for December 1806 when he joined the regiment. This gave me his exact date of birth, 2 November 1786, and showed that he had enlisted at Dumbarton. The muster also showed the height of all the recruits, and of the 35 men on the page, only two men were taller than William.

So thanks to these military records I know that my Irish ancestor from two centuries ago arrived in Scotland, where he spent his life after the army, before he joined up. I have some idea what he looked like, and I even know his exact date and place of birth, where the parish records didn't start  until much later. Not a bad result for an Irishman.