Where was my Great, Great, Great Grandfather ‘Billy’ Swift 220 years ago today? Thanks to a Battle of Trafalgar records update on Find My Past, I now believe that he was on board the HMS Ajax, picking up survivors from a storm which followed the battle.
Searching the British Library Newspaper Archive in October 2013, I came across this notice from the births, deaths and marriages column of the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent dated 18 November 1862.
If he was aged 78 when he died in 1862, that makes his birth year 1784.
Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:
Could my great great great grandfather really have been ‘present at the Battle of Trafalgar’ on 21 October 1805?
I’ve put in a request for the death certificate to check that this really is ‘our’ William Swift. We already knew that he’d worked at Joseph Rodgers from an obituary notice for his son, Samuel Burgin Swift, who followed in his footsteps there (as did his grandson).
My mum has the article, reprinted as a handbill;
‘he [Samuel] was a thoughtful, industrious workman, and inherited the skill of his father “Billy Swift”.
It seems to me unlikely that a young man from landlocked Sheffield would have served in the Battle of Trafalgar but Geoffrey Tweedale, author of A Directory of Sheffield Cutlery Manufacturers, 1742-2010, tells me; ‘Being at Trafalgar is not so strange — he lived a long life and his earlier career could have included military service. I’ve come across at least a couple of cutlers/silver platers who saw action during the Napoleonic War.’
That “Billy Swift” in quotes misled me. The only William Swift that I could find at Trafalgar was Irish, serving on the HMS Temeraire, but the new records include one more Swift serving at the Battle of Trafalgar: Samuel Swift, a Landsman, born in 1784 in Nottingham.
He would have been 21 years old at the time of Battle of Trafalgar, so just the right age for our “Billy Swift”. Samuel is a name which comes up in the Swift family tree, for instance ‘Billy’s’ son Samuel Burgin Swift.
Time to find out more about Samuel Swift (1784 – 1862) from Nottinghamshire, as I feel that he’s a likely match for my ancestor.
Update
At last I’ve tracked down my ancestor William Swift at the Battle of Trafalgar: he did change his name, but not to Samuel Swift.