Kelly

I assume the family were RC. Unfortunately Inver RC baptism & marriage records don?t start till 1861, so if he was married there in the 1830s you won?t find a church record of it. (That?s not untypical for Co Donegal where few RC parishes have records for the first half of the 1800s.)

If James and Mary happened to have any children born in Scotland in 1855 or 1861 onwards, then the date and place of the parent?s marriage will normally be recorded on the child?s birth certificate (which you can get on the Scotlandspeople site).

If James & Mary ever claimed under the Poor Law (and many Irish residing in Scotland did claim), then their parish in Ireland will normally be recorded in the Scottish Poor Law files, often with details of family and next of kin. You don?t say where in Scotland they resided, but if it was in the Glasgow area then the Poor Law records for that area are in the Mitchell Library.

http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/libraries/the-mitchell-library/Pages/home.aspx

I looked for mentions of Irish fighting for the French at Waterloo. According to this reference, there was a Legion Irlandaise, but they didn?t fight at Waterloo, and were disbanded soon after.

http://www.militaryheritage.com/irish.htm

Statistically, I would have thought he was more likely to have been in the British army, but obviously that?s just speculative.

 James,

You are lucky. You obviously have an 1855 Scottish birth certificate. In that year only, they recorded all the information about how many children the parents had as well as date and place of marriage, on the certificate. It was dropped after that year because the Registrars complained there was too much work involved. Date and place of parents marriage was reinstated in 1861 but not the number of previous children. But lucky you.

Regarding the possible military career, having read what you say, I can see how that could be interpreted in different ways. It might just mean he was old enough to remember the battle of Waterloo taking place, rather than that he was there.

There was no conscription in Ireland and so recruits were all volunteers. Consequently there was a fair amount of campaigning to get people to sign up. (And many did). If you read it that he might have fought on the French side, you would need to ask yourself how he learned to speak French. If he wasn?t in an Irish battalion (and there don?t appear to have been any at Waterloo) then he?d be in an ordinary French unit and would surely need to speak French? Where would he have learned that? So if he was there, I?d say he fought on the British side. But he might not have been there at all.

Waterloo was obviously one of these keystone events, like the great storm of January 1839 (when hundreds were killed by collapsing buildings etc, and some accounts tell of the grass being ripped from the ground), which older people would mention if you asked them about their lives.

I suppose today it would be like remembering where you were when JFK was shot or when 9/11 occurred.

 

Elwyn