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.  

What did you do in the War, Grandpa?

David Donaldson 23 August 1895 - 14 March 1958

I never actually asked him because he died when I was four, but I have found out quite a bit, as it happens. Today would have been his birthday if he'd lived to a record-breaking age, so it's a good day to remember him.

The picture on the right is the grandpa I remember, although more cheerful - he always looked grumpy in pictures, I have no idea why. He always wore a collarless shirt and a waistcoat, and he always had a tiny little stub of a pencil in the pocket. I would say 'draw funny man' and he'd take out the pencil and draw little clown pictures for me.

He was born and died in Govan, and like many men there he worked in the Glasgow shipyards; when he married my grandmother in 1917 the marriage certificate showed his occupation - iron driller - and the ship that he was serving on, HMS Emperor of India. I had known that he was in the Royal Navy, but when I found his service record I was surprised to find that he seemed to have only joined the navy in August 1917. If I had looked closely I would have noticed that the marriage certificate, dated four months earlier, gave the name of his ship.

TNA Ref: ADM 188/1073/315

The answer was that he had been on board HMS Emperor of India since 1915, but as a member of the Royal Naval Division. His record on HMS Emperor of India was exemplary, but after he transferred to HMS Ramilles in January 1918 it was a different story. He was court-martialled for wilful disobedience of lawful commands, and an act to prejudice of good order and naval discipline. He then made things even worse by escaping from custody. Orders for his demobilisation were cancelled, and he was recaptured and imprisoned in June 1918. Fortunately for him, he never served the year's imprisonment with hard labour to which he originally been sentenced. In October 1918 his sentence was suspended and he was released to civilian life. He was not alone in his misbehaviour, his shipmate James Finlay, from Leith, was convicted of the same offences at the same time, and they escaped together. I haven't been able to discover any more about the actual incident so far, but I may get to the bottom of it one day. I do know that while he was locked up he read the Bible. He was never at all religious, but since it was the only reading material available he read it just to pass the time. He had a remarkable memory, and for the rest of his life he could quote extensively from it.  

TNA Ref: ADM 339/1

In fact, he signed up for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve a few days before his 20th birthday in 1915.

TNA Ref: ADM 337/27/7

He was very keen on ships, that's for sure, whether building them or sailing on them. The family story goes that when he was having a row with my Granny during the Second World War he stormed out of the house saying that he was going to join the Navy again, and he'd be killed at sea and then she'd be sorry! The Navy didn't want him; as a skilled man he was much more valuable in the shipyard!

I don't have a photograph of him in uniform, but there a picture of him with my grandmother, probably taken around the time they married, although it is not a wedding photograph.

He was the fourth of thirteen children, and his three elder brothers were also of an age to serve in the First World War. I have found no trace of the two eldest brothers serving in any of the armed forces, but the third one, George, served in the Highland Light Infantry and was killed towards the end of the war, in August 1918.

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

Commonwealth War Graves Registers on Ancestry - worth the trouble?

When I saw that these records had been added to Ancestry, I wondered what the point was, since the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site already has all this information, and it is completely free. It also has cemetery plans, and all sorts of other information, including printable certificates for each casualty. But of course I had to have a closer look, just in case there was something there that I was missing. The results were quite interesting.

Plymouth Naval Memorial  

The Commonwealth War Graves site has a single database for all services and nationalities, and for both world wars. The records recently added to Ancestry.com are for the First world War only, and comprise two separate databases. First there is the 'British Commonwealth War Graves Register 1914-1918' which contains entries from only about 250 cemeteries in three countries; most of them are in France, with a few in Belgium and Iraq. The source is the series of books printed by the Imperial War Graves Commission (as it was called then) in the 1920s. I compared a number of entries in these books with their equivalents on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) site, and found no differences, except that in a few cases the printed books said 'killed in action', 'died of wounds' or 'died of disease', which did not appear on the website. I did find one entry where the CWGC gave the wrong date - 1916 instead of 1918 - but the correct date was in the book.

So there doesn't seem to be any great advantage in using Ancestry for these war deaths, beyond the outside chance of finding a entry that had been mis-transcribed by the CWGC. We can already check 'Soldiers Died in the Great War' for place of birth and place of enlistment, a database which is available on more than one site. But there is one advantage to using Ancestry; not for the information it gives, but for the search engine. If you put a place name in the Keyword(s) box you can find men from a particular town, and the name search finds names of next of kin as well as the fallen soldiers - try putting in female names and you will see what I mean.

The second set of records is 'UK, Royal Navy and Royal Marine War Graves Roll, 1914-1919' and for all the entries that I compared provides more detail than the CWGC. This often includes next of kin information, and exact birthdate where the CWGC just gives an age at death. I also found a number of cases where the CWGC gave only initials, but Ancestry's database provides full names. So this is definitely worth using, even if you have already found and entry for your sailor or marine on the CWGC site - with a couple of exceptions. First of all, the men listed are in the Royal Navy or the Royal Marines, but not the Merchant Navy, although I found a member of my own family there who was a merchant seaman, but whose ship had been commandeered by the Royal Navy, so there should be others like him.  Ancestry's description of the records suggests that the database contains records of Royal Navy and Royal Marines officers, but I could only find records of other ranks. One section of the description refers to the War Office, and seems to apply to the Army rather than the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, whose records were kept by the Admiralty. I will need to investigate further to get to the bottom of this. Watch this space.

Warlike Wednesday: determined to join up

There are lots of family stories about young men lying about their age to join the army, and I have the proof of one right here. James Calderhead tried harder than most. He is not my ancestor, but he is part of a family closely connected with mine.

Almost as soon as was was declared in 1914, he signed up for three years' service in the Scottish Rifles, claiming to be 19 years old. Note the statement 'You are hereby warned that if after enlistment it is found that you gave a wilfully false answer to any of the following seven questions, you will be liable to a punishment of two years' imprisonment with hard labour'. So the army specifically did not threaten this as a punishment for giving a false age, one of the question before the warning.


The National Archives ref: WO 364/592

A few months later, he was discharged 'having made a misstatement as to age on enlistment' and a further note says 'Date of birth according to birth certificate 25th March 1901', which made him 13 when he tried to enlist. This is a clerical error, because I have a copy of his birth certificate, and he was actually  born on 25th March 1900. But 14 is a bit on the young side too, I think!

The National Archives ref: WO 364/592

In the autumn of 1915 he had another go, this time he joined the Royal Marines

The National Archives ref: ADM 159/162

The physical description part of this form (not illustrated) shows that he had grown 2 inches taller in the intervening year, but the Royal Marines took less than a month to rumble him, and he was discharged again for 'Mis-statement as to age' on 7th October. Undeterred by this, he decided to give the army another try, and less than two weeks after his discharge from the Royal Marines, he signed up for the duration in the Lovat Scouts

The National Archives ref: WO 364/592

This time he managed to serve 59 days before being found out, so he was back on Civvy Street before Christmas 1915.

The National Archives ref: WO 364/592

But did he give up? Of course not. Less than three months later, and about three weeks before his 16th birthday he joined the Royal Navy. He claimed to be nearly twenty years old, and this time he got away with it. His record shows that he served for the remainder of the war as an Ordinary Seaman, and was finally discharged in January 1919.

The National Archives ref: ADM 188/748

That is probably the end of the story, but on the birth certificate of one of his 14 children his occupation is given as 'Merchant seaman', so perhaps he had found life at sea appealed to him. However, I haven't found any evidence of this in the merchant navy records we have at The National Archives...yet.

Warlike Wednesday: the War of 1812 - from the other side

I was lucky enough to be present when the Federation of Genealogical Societies Preserve the Pensions appeal was launched. These records are held at the National Archives in Washington DC, but there are two sides to any argument, and it set me thinking about any records from the British side that might be held in The National Archives in the UK.

Not surprisingly, there is quite a lot of material, and some of the records are full of the names of prisoners. Many prisoners were held on ships, and some of the most interesting records are the surgeons' journals kept by the Admiralty. They not only contain names, but give quite a lot more information besides. One of these is the surgeon's journal for the prison ship 'Bahama' carrying American and Danish prisoners.

The National Archives reference ADM 89/1

One of the volumes contains details of the illnesses and treatment of a number of men who were attended by the surgeon while the ship was at Chatham between 1812 and 1814. Some of the patients were sailors or marines, but most were prisoners. Some pages are just lists of names, but for a number of men ages are given, along with details of their illnesses, treatment, and whether they survived. Most of them did - there were only three deaths on board - but several of them, probably the sicker ones, were transferred to the hospital ship 'Trusty'.

The American prisoners whose ages and details appear were:

Alfred Leonard 39, Abnes Polland 41, Procter Symmonds 19, George Symington 48, George Brown 36, Adimus Bowen 44, Jeremiah Hill 46, Mr Lane (Mate) 48, Henry Shaw 32, Golding Spencer 30, Henry Scott 29, Capt Light 54, Francis Williams 28, Charlemagne 28

Medical details, but no ages, are given for:

James Head, Nicholas Noble, James Odihorne, Artimus Bowen, Jonathan Freeman.

All of these men either recovered or were transferred to the Trusty, except for Golding Spencer and Jonathan Freeman. Golding Spencer died of smallpox, and the unfortunate Jonathan Freeman died as the result of 'a singular kind of tumor in the groin' which was mis-diagnosed as a hernia by the first two surgeons who saw him. The third, James Brenan, took a great interest in this case, and wrote it up at great length. The abcess burst, and his symptoms were described in graphic detail. He succumbed to a fever as a result, was sent to the Trusty, but returned to the Bahama, apparently recovered, only to suffer a relapse that caused him to be sent back to the Trusty again, where he died.