An ancestor of mine, John Richardson, was a commander in the Royal Navy. He served in the Mediterranean in 1841, but then seems to have been beached, probably on very little pay. He next surfaces in 1848, the year of Revolutions, when he seems to have been commissioned by his brother-in-law, Henry Reeve, to travel Central Europe to report on events....which Reeve could then write up for The Times (where he wrote the foreign leaders). Between 1841 and 1848, he appears to have been living in Clausenberg (now Cluj-Napoca) in what is now Romania. He seems to have been married with two children. In 1851 he was appointed to the Galway coastguard, and died in 1855.
I have no idea what he was doing in Clausenberg, but would be interested to find out. So, it's a long shot, but does anyone have any idea of the kind of records of aliens that would have been kept by the Austrian authorities in the 1840s and where they might be found?
Andrew
