Expert’s Choice
Anthony Adolph is a genealogist and the author of Tracing Your Family History
The militia holds a particular place in the hearts of family historians, because the lists that were compiled in order to muster local forces comprise a sort-of ‘pre-census’ census of able-bodied men. Each parish would draw up lists of adult males, before holding a ballot to choose who would serve. The process generated a lot of written records, but many of them are scattered and fragmentary.
There are a host of places where you may find militia lists or muster rolls – local museums, county archives, regimental museums and national repositories. That creates a confusing situation, but fortunately The National Archives’ website provides an excellent starting point for searches. You can use its online catalogue at discovery.nationalarchives.gov. uk to make specific searches of archival holdings across the country, find references to documents only available at TNA, search within digitised records of service, and find links to other online resources, such as the militia attestation papers available on Findmypast ( findmypast.co.uk).
On the same website is TNA’s superb militia guide at nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/researchguides/armed-forces-1522-1914.htm. This describes how these part-time, voluntary local forces first came to be and provides a chronological guide to what sort of records to expect, and how to go about finding them. It is worth noting that, despite all of the advances in computers, the website still acknowledges Jeremy Gibson and Alan Dell’s book Tudor and Stuart Muster Rolls (1989) as the prime finding aid for 1522–1649.
w cornwall-opc-database.org/extra-searches/muster-rolls
It’s worth seeing if any militia-related sources have been transcribed or indexed by local bodies, such as record societies (whose early volumes are often freely available online), local-history and family-history groups, or enthusiastic volunteers. This is the website of the long-running Cornwall OPC project, whose wide range of transcribed genealogical material includes this Cornish muster from 1569. Although the muster recorded all able men between the ages of 16 and 60, you’re advised not to search surnames “too tightly”, because spellings are variable and indeed “surnames still seem to be in their formative years especially in some areas”.