HMS Ganges

[Sue G]

My great grandfather, Daniel Watson, was a poor boy from a large Manchester family who at about 15 joined the naval training ship HMS Ganges anchored near Falmouth in Cornwall. I gather the ship took boys from workhouses and poverty stricken families. I have found some web sites about the Ganges, but they mostly seemed pre-occupied with reunions of "lads" who were on Ganges in the twentieth century.

What I'd like to know is if anyone knows of where there mught be records of, for instance, the boys on ship in any particular year, or where they came from, and so on. I gather it was pretty grim and they had a hard time.

Daniel became a merchant seaman, but he married a Cornish girl, Clara Hocking, and settled in Mylor in Cornwall.

Also, Daniel is not to be found in the 1881 census, so I assume he was at sea (he and Clara married in 1882). Is there any way of tracking which ship he might have been on?

[AnnB]

I would suggest, as a starting point, you search the catalogue of the National Archives, www.catalogue.nationalarchives.gov.uk/default.asp I put in Ganges and ADM in the relevent parts of the search form, and there are masses of refs. If you can add dates as well to the search, it will obviously narrow it down. If you are a bit devious with your terms in a search engine (I used Google and the phrase Ganges training Falmouth) you will come up with quite a lot of refs which refer to the actual training of the boys, etc.

Best wishes
Ann