Royal Navy service records
The Family Tree Academy is here to help you grow your genealogy skills. The aim is to help teach more about the search skills and source know-how needed to step up your family history research.
In this issue, Family Tree Academy tutor David Annal looks at a range of sources to help you trace an ancestor‘s life in the Royal Navy, both before 1853, the date from which a centralised record system was established, and afterwards.
The Royal Navy is known as the ‘Senior Service’ as it can trace its origins back to the reign of King Henry VIII, almost 200 years before the first standing army was established.
Although never as big as the Army in terms of the number of men on the books, the Navy has always been a major employer. At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the British fleet comprised around 140,000 men (and, apparently, one woman), while the official Report on the 1881 Census gives a total of 44,000 officers and men in the service at that time.
A guide to The records
This is an introductory guide to tracing the records of those
