Mark: I have had exactly the same problem in the last couple of years, and have had quite a bit of success in tracing my ancestor. The first thing to say is that the records you need are only available at the Public Record Office in Kew, and you'll have to go there to search them. If that's OK, read on! If your man was a Greenwich Pensioner then he was either a sailor or a Royal Marine. If he was a Sergeant, then he must have been a marine. Take a look at the TNA site. There's some useful research guides there on tracing a Royal Marine. The marines were divided into 3 divisions, based at Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth. These divisions were then further divided into companies. The number of companies varied across time, but was often around 150. These weren't arranged in the obvious way of companies 1-50 being at Plymouth (say), but rather 1, 4, 7, 10 etc were at Chatham, 2, 5, 8 etc at Portsmouth and 3, 6, 9 etc at Plymouth. (It's possible this arrangement varied over time). It will greatly simplify your work if you can find out what company your man was in. The research leaflets give a number of ways of doing this, but in my case none of them worked. In the end I simply chose a year when I was fairly sure when my man was in the marines and then searched all of the pay records starting with the 1st company. This is actually much easier than it sounds, and it only took me about an hour to find him in the 72nd company, which is one of the Plymouth ones. The pay records are in ADM96, and called "Royal Marines Effective". There's one large sheet per company per quarter year. Unfortunately the indexes of exactly what records are to be found where aren't all that good, so there's a bit of trial and error needed to get going. But once you've found him in one pay record, you can track him forward and backwards in time. In each quarter's records., it states what happened to each man when he transferred in or out of barracks, usually from or to a ship. You then get the ship's records at the PRO etc. There's lots more, and if you're still with me and want to give it a go then email me off-list and I'll fill in more detail. Good luck Paul Prescott ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Jennings" <m_jenningsuk@yahoo.co.uk> To: <ENG-BLACK-COUNTRY-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 12:36 PM Subject: [B.C.] military records > Hi, > > Has anyone any experience of where to look for a > military number. > > I have a Greenwich pensioner 1851 born abt 1785, who > states on his sons marriage certificate, that he was a > staff sergeant. > > Presumably this was Royal Marines, he was not at > Trafalgar though. > > Has anyone any thoughts on what documentation to > request. I assume he would not be on an officers list. > > Has anyone any thoughts, or experience of this. > > Regards. > > Mark > > > > ___________________________________________________________ > Switch an email account to Yahoo! Mail, you could win FIFA World Cup > tickets. http://uk.mail.yahoo.com > > > ==== ENG-BLACK-COUNTRY Mailing List ==== > Wherever possible (except for personal messages) > please post replies to the list.Other people can learn from them! > >