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General => Armed Forces => Topic started by: Barbara1 on Saturday 28 June 14 22:52 BST (UK)
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I have an ancestor, who was in the Royal Marines based in Plymouth in 1832. I have found his Navy Records, and some of the vessels he served on. I could do with some help making sure I am reading them correctly. Plus info on these vessels. Is there anyone you can help ?
Thank you.
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You are allowed to post parts of a record to get it translated. In this period "Plymouth Div" means he was shore based. If you see something like 'Battn' - especially if he was awarded a medal - then he was part of a RM land based battalion formed from all the Royal Marines in the fleet to fight on land - Crimea and China for example. My GGGF fought in China and Japan.
You can search the name of the ship (without HMS) on the advanced search on the NA catalogue, using series = adm. There may be a Ships Log which will tell you where it sailed. There may also be muster/crew lists. These have not been put online. You may be lucky and find the surgeons log, some of which have been indexed. But these appear to be mainly for convict ships.
Wikipedia will usually tell you the rating and history of a ship. IE for HMS Asia (1824) you get - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Asia_(1824) Names were reused, so it is normal to put the launch date in brackets to tell them apart.
A rule of thumb is that there was one marine per gun in its 'rating'. Small Royal Marine detachments were commanded by an NCO. Larger ships would have officer(s) in charge.
Ken