In researching my Ewing ancestors the dead (no pun intended) end has been our immigrant ancestor, William Ewing, who came to American in the mid-1700s as a member (we suspect) of the elite British military unit known as the Grenadier Guards.  Other than this nothing is known by any of the folks I know are working on our line.  It was hoped that the British National Archives where military records are held would have some additional clues.

So - having wanted to make the trip for a number of years, my daughter Lindsey and I finally took off for London on Friday, January 16th.  We arrived at London's Heathrow airport at 6 am, checked in at the hotel and headed straight for the National Archives.  The Archives are only open 9:30 am to 4:30 pm so we knew we had to get down to business in a hurry.

The staff at the archives were exceptionally helpful.  We knew exactly what we wanted and were escorted to the shelves containing the holdings catalogs.  We quickly identified the document numbers that we wanted and put in our request online.  We suspected that the records would be sometime between 1745-60 but just to be safe we requested the muster records for the Grenadier Guards for 1730-1765.  During our wait for the documents to be retrieved we were shown the locker room and instructed that we would only be allowed to take 1 tablet of paper, lead pencils and one laptop into the reading room.  So we locked everything else up and then went off to receive our pass into the reading room.  The pass required submitting information online as to our purpose for requesting admittance to the reading room.  We were then photographed and our identity with two forms of identification.  We then got instructions on document handling.  No photocopies of documents were allowed but non-flash photography was.

After about 30 minutes our documents were ready and we went to the reading room entrance with our passes in hand.  Our tablet and laptop was inspected and we went through metal detectors.  Once inside we picked up our documents and proceeded to the table were were assigned. 

My first hint as the success of our venture came as we picked up the three books of bound documents that were very thin.  As we began to study the documents we discovered that there were records for only 1730-33, 1740 and 1760-63.  Apparenly none of the records inthe 15 year period we were most interested in survived.  But, none-the-less we diligently studieds every document looking for any Ewing or any variant of the name - to no avail.

My initial reaction was deep disappointment and regret that we had gone to the time and expense of traveling to London.  But then as we talked we realized that we were actually holding documents almost 300 years old!  Just the privilege was amazing!  We began to look at the documents with an entirely new perspective - realizing that they were likely created out in the countryside with a feather quill.  The penmanship was amazing!  I wish now that I had taken a photograph of one of the documents just to show folks how interesting the documents were.  Soldiers were listed as either present, or absent due to furlough, on guard, party (anyone know what this means?) or as a desserter.  The officers were identified with their rank as were the drum and fife members of the units.

Although I didn't find what I had hoped to, at least the adventure does provide closure to the burning question - do clues to our European ancestors exist in the military records for William Ewing? 

So now what - well, I believe the only remaining opportunity is to convince one of my male Ewing ancestors to participate in the yDNA project - we may not find out who William's director ancestors were this way but we may be able to connect the dots with other Ewing researchers who have been fortunate enough to trace their lines back to Ireland and Scotland.