The Chelsea pensioners’ records form one of the National Archives’ most popular sets of records in the reading rooms at Kew, and findmypast.com, in association with The National Archives, are currently scanning the WO97 documents (Royal Hospital Chelsea: Soldiers Service Documents 1760-1913) for online release.
The WO96 papers (War Office: Militia Attestation Papers 1806-1915) documents are also being scanned and it is hoped that both sets of records will be available online in their entirety by 2011. A total of around nine million images will be made available, which will be searchable by name.
Visitors to the National Archives at Kew will not be able to access those records that are being scanned. Documents are being scanned in batches and a scanning schedule is available on The National Archives’ site.
Was your ancestor a Chelsea pensioner?
The 1841-1911 censuses are a useful cross-referencing tool that may reveal one or more of your ancestors as Chelsea pensioners. In-pensioners are the iconic gents in scarlet coats and tricorne hats who reside at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. Census returns may indicate their Chelsea pensioner status under the ‘occupation’ column.
In other instances finding someone described as an ‘army pensioner’, or references to them being ex-army or ex-military, are all good clues that they might have been a Chelsea pensioner.
We will update the blog with further news and likely launch dates on both sets of records as we get them.
Tags: attestation, chelsea, Military, office, papers, pensioners, war, WO96, WO97
I hope you’ll be making these searchable by regiment and regimental number too, and not just by name. Much of the utility of these records will be lost if you don’t include these key fields.
The prime users of these records at the National Archives are medal collectors, military researchers and regimental historians rather than people searching for their ancestors (although there is obviously significant interest from that area as well). As such, it would be most useful if they were indexed properly.
As was mentioned when these series were put out to bid the “Friends of the National Archives” have been transcribing such files using Soldier’s Name, Place of Birth, Regiment(s), Year of discharge, covered dates of service.
Personally, I would think this should be a minimum requirement, and something like Ancestry’s indexing of the WO363 and WO364 files should be emulated. There they include name, age, birth year, residence location, birth county, regiment, number.
Providing a search based solely on a name just won’t provide much utility for many existing and potential subscribers. I pity the poor researchers who are going to have to look for “John Smith” if all they’ll have is a surname search to wade through.
@Matthew: exact details of the search and indexing are still being determined but rest assured that we always transcribe fully and aim to make as many fields searchable as possible - indeed we lead the market on this on our census collection.
Our minimum aim is to improve upon the searchability, accuracy and indexing of WO363/4.
Ian,
Thank for responding.
Hopefully you can emulate your performance on the Census with these new products then.
I’m just concerned this may be overlooked because you haven’t been able to implement ‘regimental’ searching yet for De Ruvigny, Soldiers Died or National Roll- all datasets that really should be searchable by regiment given the information contained in them and the relative ease of transcribing printed text.
Perhaps there was a licencing issue with these products preventing you from doing more than the minimum you have provided to date, but hopefully you won’t have such an issue with WO96/97.
I look forward to seeing the end results in 2011.
Hello Matthew: yes, these datasets were a little odd in that we didn’t digitise them from fresh but rather acquired them through a licencing deal with a partner in the format they’re currently in which didn’t allow for backwards engineering to make them more searchable. Where we do fresh digitisations, we have complete control over the imaging and transcriptions and therefore the search fields.