Filed under Royal Navy Service Records: A Method Guide
What should you look for first?
A shore establishment is a land base given a ship's name, such as a training or depot establishment, and it appears in service records like a ship posting. Do not mistake a stone frigate for sea service without checking the establishment's role.
A single record can be wrong on a detail, so a match needs more than one agreement, and a disagreement needs a note, not a deletion. Search for the person you can prove, not the person you hope to find. The provable person has a number, a unit and a date range; the hoped-for person has only a story.
The order to work in
The steps below assume you have already fixed the person, the number, and the dates as far as you can. If you have not, do that first, and then return. Work forward through time, not backwards, unless a later record is the only one that names the earlier period. Forward is the direction records explain.
- Fix the service dates first, so you know which holder is likely to hold the file.
- Note the service number and the rating or rank together, exactly as written.
- List ships and shore establishments in date order, and treat each draft as a separate check.
- Test every later record, log entry or casualty entry, against the personal file before adding it to the timeline.
How to read this kind of entry
What a record omits can be as informative as what it includes, but only if you know what that kind of record usually includes. Learn the form before you judge the gap. Do not assume a modern map, a modern rank table, or a modern unit list applies to a record from another decade. Check the period source for the period entry.
When a record and a published history disagree, the record written at the time wins, and the history becomes a question, not an answer. An entry that gives a town but no county, or a camp but no town, is deliberately vague or locally obvious. Local knowledge, not a global search, usually settles it.
What are the common dead ends?
A record that is closed, a record that is withheld in part, and a record that is lost are different outcomes with different remedies. The holder reply says which. Where a record set is arranged by unit rather than by surname, a surname search alone will miss it. Mirror the catalogue structure, and the record set opens up.
Each dead end here is a normal research outcome, not a personal failure, and each one points to a next check rather than to a conclusion. Do not spend a session repeating a search that failed. Spend it on a different record type, a different holder, or a different filter, and note what changed.
What to open after this one
If the timeline now has a gap with a name on each side of it, the next record is the one that could bridge that gap, and no other record will do. Let the question this record raised choose the next record. A record opened out of curiosity, rather than out of a question, rarely advances a timeline.
Keep the person, the number and the dates together as you move to the next record, and re-check them on arrival. Filters drift when they are carried in memory. Research done slowly, with references, outlasts research done quickly, with enthusiasm. Choose the slower kind.
Primary sources for this guide
Everything here is kept general and tied to official holders, so check the current position with the holder for your own case. The guide is educational information only: it is not personal professional advice, it is not a lookup service, and it settles nothing about any one person's service.