hi Carole If you let me have your address I'll put Walter John's cert in the post. Recapping where I / we have got to with my Walter, we don't know that much for sure. FreeBMD gives a Walter Watts born Dec qu 1861 in Chipping Sodbury. I haven't sent for the birth cert and poss ought to. In the 1871 census he was living aged 9 with his widowed father and sister Sarah Jane in Lower Kilcott. By 1881, Sarah Jane had left home and his father John is living in Kilcott with a housekeeper and lodgers with no mention of Walter. The entry in 1881 ( RG11 piece 2488 Folio 69 page 13 ) giving a Walter WATTS, private, in the Horfield Barracks isn't a perfect match for age, giving his date of birth as 1863 and age as 18. His birthplace is given as Hawkesbury. I think our identification of this as 'my' Walter is based largely on the belief that all other Walter WATTS from Hawkesbury had been accounted for. I've not had time to check military records, having hoped to bypass them with the 1901 entry which turned out to be off target. I've been back over all the old scraps of family info. My father, Sarah Jane's grandson, left the briefest of notes saying that he thought Sarah Jane had a brother and nephew who were "farmers at Badminton". I would treat this with caution. Agricultural worker seems possible however and the family tended to use the name Badminton very loosely so he could be anywhere in Gloucestershire. It does seem however to indicate that if Walter ever was in the army he survived and possibly returned to the area and raised a family. Sarah Jane lived to a ripe old age in Greater Badminton, dying aged 96 in 1949, so there would have been regional connections. Maybe one day he'll put his head back over the parapet and we'll bag him then! cheers Liz