Marvellous advice

Dear Birgitte,
Thank you very much. All I know about George HAMILTON is that when he
was "Naturalised" here in 1891 he said he was 51 years.
Yes the name sounds English and I am following up on that - searching
the PRO in London for soldiers in Germany named HAMILTON. I am also
happy to believe he "Anglicised" his name, but I believe it was
Hamilton in Germany as it was a very common thing here for Germans to
Anglicise their names at Naturalisation and he chose not to. He had
arrived here as George Hamilton, I believe, although I can find no
arrival records for him - that is, partly, why I am supposing he was a
mariner. When his first child was born her birth was registered as
Margaret Hammelson. This leads me to believe his mother tongue was
German.
So, he was born c 1840. His name was George HAMILTON. He was a
mariner. He came from Hannover. That is all I know so far.
I have received some advice from Listers - there are a couple of places
in the former kingdom of Hanover where the name Hamilton does not
appear. I am very grateful to those people for having looked out for
him. I have also been informed that 'English sounding" names are not
all that rare in the Hannover area so I live in hope.
Thank you for the advice that you recall the name HAMILTON in your
searches. I will keep the county of Tecklenburg in mind. Yes, I agree
he might have descended from a union between an English (scottish,
irish) soldier and a Hannoverian. I hope this is the case, I do not
have any German ancestors yet. Did you see the list of towns that I
posted recently? They are towns known to have been visited by one
English regiment in the 1820s.
Brigitte, when you say I'll have to wait, do you mean for Jens Kaufmann
and co. to digitise the census (a marvellous project) or till I can save
up and spend the necessary time in Hannover <grin>
Regards, Jan

Jan, try this URL. It lists English and Scottish soldiers.
If your ancestor was a military pensioner, you may find him on the PRO
catalogue.
To search for him follow the following steps.

http://catalogue.pro.gov.uk/

If you are looking for a soldier who was discharged to pension between
1760-1854, you can try a keyword search using the surname of the individual
soldier concerned, within WO 97 and WO 121 (Discharge Documents of
Pensioners). Please follow these steps:

1. Choose the 'Search the catalogue' option.
2. In Box 1, enter the surname
3. Ignore the date range in Box 2
4. In box 3, enter the series references WO 97,WO 121
5. Click on 'Search' and wait for the results
6. One particular point to note about these references: make a note of the
appropriate document reference, but ignore the last two numbers, eg
Alexander Fleming in WO 97/50/24 - the relevant reference is actually WO
97/50.

Hope this helps,

Also, there was quite frequent trade between Scotland and Germany in terms
of wool for centuries.
There were Scottish settlements in some of the German towns as a result
because of the trade alliances made.
Good luck!

Laura