Thanks Rosie,It is a thought, just one which had never occured to me before. I am sure William would have started off small, working for others and perhaps leasing a small parcel of land until he was able to expand. He had a large family of girls, so needed to be pretty self sufficient in the end. Amazingly, I received my Australian Family Tree Connections magazine today, and in the section for Computers & Genealogy, was a bit saying that Find My Past now has records of men who served in the British militia from 1806 to 1915. These also included men from Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa, Ceylon. This made me wonder if he may have even been a part time member of the militia. Aparently the data even includes physical descriptions of those enlisted. I am not familiar on where to search for Briish Military records, but I suppose it would be the National Archives as well as FMP Thanks for your great suggestions, Regards, Nan On 27 July 2011 17:16, xpn11 <xpn11@aol.com> wrote: > Nan, > It might not be him- like a twit I seached for him ( just because some > of my family came from Upwell . One of the Upwell family shows up on > the 1891 as being in the Army reserve) using Norfolk then remembered > that Upwell was in Cambridgeshire back then. There were about four > William Rawlings/Rawling showing up from Cambridgeshire but I didn't > have time to cross check them all. > Don't forget that unless he was getting capital from his mother or > step father he had to find it somewhere, even if he just took a tenancy > rather than buying the land and being a soldier might have paid better > than being a horseman. He would have needed a cart horse or two and some > machinery to start up with. There was a fine line between labourer and > farmer in the Fens until recently. My 3x great grandfather farmed 250 + > acres by the time he died but his son, my 2x great grandfather was the > eldest of several children and left home to start up by himself before > his father had enough land to support two families. So he was an ag lab > before he managed to farm on his own account. This applied also to my > great grandfather and grandfather in turn. Both were horsemen on other > farms ( including the Scotts of Christchurch near Upwell) before > managing to save/borrow buy farms of their own. There were many many > small holdings in the Fens/Marshland which enabled families to get a > foot on the farming ladder. > Rosie > > >