James Oliver Army Discharge Papers
Although the most common and easily accessible genealogical resources such as census returns and Birth, Marriage and Death (BMD) records without doubt help give us a good framework about our family history, we quite often have to dig a little deeper into other, sometimes less obvious, records and resources to gather more detailed facts about the life's and time's of our ancestors.
Newspapers, wills, immigration records, school records and church records to name but a few are often available for access and can often present new, valuable and interesting findings. These records can however be more difficult to locate, they can be quite time consuming to search and be less immediate in terms of results, however, the hard work can quite often be well rewarded.
Military records are one such record type worthy of time and effort and below are the discharge records of James Oliver, which provides some wonderful information.
From scanning the document we can see the following:
- James served in His Majesty's 56th Regiment of Foot
- It confirms he was born in Finstock
- He enlisted a Barham Down on the 20th July 1799 for unlimited service
- He served for more that 19 years
- Almost all of this service was completed in the East Indies
- His reason for discharge is recorded as 'being worn out'
- His character as a soldier was 'Good'
- We see the 'x' mark of James
- His height is 5" 10 and a half, grey hair, grey eyes with fair complexion
(Click and hold your mouse pointer on the image, then drag, up and down to pan across the document).
