One of our current clients has asked us to look for the details of an ancestor's military service in the 19th century.
It is possible to track down individual details alongside the general details of where people served in the 19th century even though individual service personnel were less well documented then than in later times. We have managed to track down the service details for our client's ancestor and have photos of his ancestor's grave which is located some many thousand miles away from Scotland.
Many people joined the services in the 19th century but sometimes this does not sit easily with their descendants as it often involved the armed forces imposing rule on other countries' populations. This in itself though is not a reason to ignore this aspect of their lives.
There were many reasons why people joined the military and most people who joined up were certainly unaware of the life that they would lead overseas or the conditions that would be imposed on local communities. Many were press ganged into the military and it is well documented that people were often plied with alcohol to entice them to take the king/queen's shilling.
Others joined because they believed the recruitment information that said that they would be offered a good life. This was often true to a point. Wages in industry could be more but there was an uncertainty to that life whilst the military offered an extended family along with a roof over your head, meals and clothing. With a population shifting from place to place for work and dreadful conditions in many cities or poverty in the countryside, the military life could often seem like an attractive proposition.
Imagine what life must have been like for these recruits? Training tended to be square bashing without any specialist training for going overseas. They were sent overseas without any idea of when or if they would return. For the officers, life was generally better but for the ordinary soldiers conditions were often basic and many died from disease or the poor conditions in which they lived. In some cases, certain postings were seen as a death sentence whatever your rank.
Thinking about how our ancestors coped with these conditions and what they must have thought of the politicians and senior military commanders who sent them to these places thousands of miles from home can be interesting and there are many documented accounts of conditions available from places such as the National Archives.
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