William Sanders

Most military records are kept in the National Archives at Kew, London. Some information is on-line on findmypast and Ancestry but a lot of the information is still in paper format, in Kew.

You can go on the NAS website to see what they hold but in most cases if there is anything, you need to employ a London based researcher to look it up for you.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

In addition to any information held on individual soldiers, most regiments kept a regimental diary which is helpful for working out where they served and what campaigns your ancestor may have been involved in.

Elwyn, I stumbled on the Shankhill Graveyard, Belfast 1830-1930 website. I found this entry:

Saunders erected by William Saunders of Belfast in memory of his beloved mother who died Jan1826 aged 60 years.

Are you able to provide further information as to what this woman's name might be? Or can you suggest any places where I might search out further information?

Thanks,

SAndy

Sandy,

The Belfast Newsletter is on-line on Ancestry.

https://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=2193&path=

If you have a subscription, you could check it to see if there was a death notice for this lady. There isn’t an exact date of death, just January. The indexed deaths on that site only start in 1828, so for 1826 you have to view each edition of the paper individually. The paper was published every 2 days in the 1820s so you would need to go through about 15 editions to cover the whole month. The births, deaths & marriages tend to be in the same place so not too difficult to find.

I did check the post 1828 newspaper index for deaths for William. None named Sanders and 1 for Saunders. He died Donaghadee 21.7.1874 so a bit late.  There were also 6 William Saunders marriages but all in the mid 1800s so too late I would suspect. One of those was in Mauritius, another in Alderney (Channel Islands), one in Dunbartonshire (Scotland) and another in Auckland (New Zealand). People travelled far and wide, making tracing them very difficult at times.

I don’t think Shankill graveyard will have any paper records. I have never heard of any and most graveyards didn’t keep records at that time. The graveyard closed in the 1930s, and is a sort of garden of remberance today.

You had to be fairly wealthy to afford a gravestone in 1826. Most people were buried in unmarked graves, so the person who erected this gravestone was a cut above. Normally a soldier wouldn’t be able to afford a gravestone, but of course we don’t know what William did after leaving the army. Perhaps he became a successful businessman? Bear in mind that the name is pretty common. Looking at the 1901 census of Ireland, there are 39 people named William Saunders/Sanders and the name would have been equally common in 1826. If not more common, as the population was bigger then. (The population of Ireland in 1841 was 8 million. It’s only 6 million today. Emigration throughout the 1800s plus the famine led to a huge drop in the population by 1900).

You might want to look at Pigots Directory of Belfast for 1824. There’s about 6 or 7 pages of names, listed mostly by occupation. You might find a William Sanders/Saunders there. http://www.failteromhat.com/pigotu.htm

Thank you for this additional information.

Sandy