A soldiers story

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For the past few years I have been unearthing our family tree. I had a head start with the Robinsons as Henry's dad did a lot of research in 1975 and I have dug deeper and we now have considerable knowledge of Robinsons, Fletchers and their ancestors as far back as the 1700's (and tentative knowledge beyond). With my side of the family I almost had to start from scratch, but the Internet had made initial research much easier. Censuses from 1841 to 1911 are available online and give a lot of detail , for instance, this is the census return from 1881 for Strickley.

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As it shows the place of birth and given age (though some are inaccurate) of all the occupants, it's a good jumping off point to records of Births, Deaths and Marriages (required by law to be registered from 1837). Things get a bit more difficult for people born before 1837, or not in the UK.

For instance, from the census of 1861 I know that my Great Great Grandfather was a Chelsea Pensioner and Shoemaker and his wife Elizabeth was born in Ireland.

The Shoemaker didn't surprise me (there were a lot of shoemakers in Kendal in the 19th Century), but the Chelsea Pension bit intrigued me. Somehow I couldn't envisage one of my ancestors wearing a fancy scarlet coat and tricorne hat. But further research (good old Internet) revealed that originally all old soldiers with more than 20 years service received a pension, and were known as out-pensioners. Those living at the Chelsea Hospital were in-pensioners.

As Wikipedia puts it -

In- and out-pensioners
During the reign of King Charles II, the Royal Hospital was still under construction, so he introduced a system for distribution of army pensions in 1689. The pension was to be made available to all former soldiers who had been injured in service, or who had served for more than 20 years.

By the time the Hospital was completed, there were more pensioners than places available in the Hospital. Eligible ex-soldiers who could not be housed in the Hospital were termed out-pensioners, receiving their pension from the Royal Hospital but living outside it. In-pensioners, by contrast, surrender their army pension and live within the Royal Hospital.

In 1703, there were only 51 out-pensioners. By 1815 this figure had risen to 36,757.

The Royal Hospital remained responsible for distributing army pensions until 1955, following which the phrase "out-pensioner" became less common, and "Chelsea pensioner" was used largely to refer to "in-pensioners".

I subscribe to a website that makes a lot of useful documents available and get regular emails about updated records etc. About 12 months ago each email had a section saying "Chelsea Pensioner records added" (from the originals held in the National Archives) and I logged on and searched for my ancestor. But each time the search came back "no results". However about a week ago, when another batch of records was released, my search came back with the record I wanted - James Garnett, by trade a Shoemaker, born in Kendal about 1813. So for the past week there has been much pouring over transcriptions in various documents, trying to decipher the different handwriting.

I have tried to transcribe these documents and hope to be able to post images of the originals and my transcriptions in this Blog- but Blogger can be a bit quirky in how it positions images, so I'll start a new post.