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IN SEARCH OF A NATAL POLICEMAN In July 2004 I acquired two campaign medals: a Queen's South Africa awarded for service during the Anglo-Boer War 1899 - 1902, and a Natal Rebellion 1906 medal named to S Grimaldi Natal Police. Little was I to know of the excitement these medals were to engender. This article is about my journey to discover more about a Natal Policeman. Part of the fun of phaleristics is researching the recipient of the medals collected and discovering something of their life story. These medals I decided I would keep so wanted to find out as much as possible about Sergeant GRIMALDI. The search was on! My first port of call was South Africa. Clearly a personal visit, although tempting, was out of the question. So the World Wide Web and search engines became my initial source. Searching on GRIMALDI produced a host of links to Italy, Monaco, actors, clowns and other famous people. Whilst surfing I found Dafanie Goldsmith's site "A Guide to Research in South Africa". From here I linked to the South African National Archives where I searched on the surname GRIMALDI. This produced seven references and the information that my man served in CID. Also from Dafanie's site I obtained the name and contact details of a researcher who lived in Durban. I made contact with Rosemary Dixon-Smith and contracted with her for research into the Natal police records. No record of a deceased estate file was found in the SA National Archives Index which indicated either he had died without assets or somewhere other than South Africa. However Rosemary was able to trace GRIMALDI's career in the NP through the enlistment and order books which are preserved in the Pietermaritzburg Archives. To date I have been unable to find a photograph of Stacey however Rosemary retrieved some reports written by him see below. At this stage I knew when and where GRIMALDI was born and some details of his service and his appearance. Due to this information I believed him to be Australian and born in November 1867. However I wanted more details, such as did he marry, when and where did he die, did he have any children. So back to the web and now the fun really began, I went on a virtual tour from the Australian outback, to the English countryside via the South African veldt, with the occasional detour to Monaco and Italy. I found the Australian National Archives website and searched on the surname to no avail. Consequently I returned to Dafanie's site from where I found Heather's genealogy site which in turn led to Cindi's Lists. A comprehensive listing of genealogy sites all in one place. A fabulous resource. This led to a surname search site which searches a number of useful sites in one hit, against named countries. That is you enter the surname and choose the country you wish to search against. I entered GRIMALDI and searched against South Africa. Nothing. Tried again with Australia. Bingo! Stacey GRIMALDI, born Swan, WA, 1867, two elder sisters also born in this area. His mother and father were English. These details came from the Church of the Latter Day Saints. A work colleague was able to inform me that ancestors are very important to the Mormons and that they have a huge database of genealogical information. I tried a further search using this utility against England and the UK. Further details were revealed, as this searched the 1881 census. I now knew Stacey and his family were back in England in 1881, his dad was a curate in Devon, Stacey himself at Probus School, Probus, Cornwall. Also there were four more siblings that I was certain of and possibly a further brother who was at Christ's Hospital School then in London before later removal to Lancing in Sussex. Now I had some geographical data I searched the web for Probus, York and Guildford in WA, Greenwich, Pietermaritzburg and other places in the UK and SA. From these searches I obtained photographs of Probus School, the Police Station in PMB where Stacey had worked, maps of Western Australia and South Africa at the time he would have lived there. The 1881 Census return had proved productive so I tried the 1901 census, which is available at the UK National Archives. There is a one hundred year embargo on publishing census returns so this was the most recent return available. This gave more details of the employment of Stacey's relatives. Further refined searching using both first and surnames produced some very exciting results. I was able to ascertain that Stacey's grandfather was also called Stacey (1790-1863) and was a genealogist and had published books on the subject. He also was a lawyer and has a room at the Law Society in London named in honour of him. Stacey's (1790) father was William GRIMALDI, a miniature portrait painter and examples of his work are available on the web. A portrait of him by his daughter-in-law is hanging in the National Gallery, London. Both these GRIMALDI's are titled as Marquis and at one stage I thought my Natal Policeman might even have been the 11th Marquis, however I later discovered Stacey (1790) had two sons earlier than my Stacey's father, Henry. One interesting fact was that Stacey (1790) had given all 9 of his children 6 sons 3 daughters as their second name Beaufort. I still do not know where this appellation has come from. There are no Beauforts in the family that I have discovered. By now I had discovered aunts and uncles and the information needed recording and ordering. I used a scratch pad to list my findings colour coding some entries. I returned to web search engines and even more exciting was the lineage of my Policeman's grandmother Mary Anne KNAPP, whom it turned out was 21st in direct descent from Henry II, her lineage includes a plethora of European royalty. Tracing William GRIMALDI's family tree led to Alexander GRIMALDI born 1659 in Genoa and died 1732 London. Other sources show this man as fleeing Genoa in 1684 for London. I had discovered a Genealogy forum and more information on the surname, including other descendants of Alexander in Australia and the USA as well as the UK. Despite these findings I still had questions about my Stacey. I found a site called FreeBMD which provided details of births, marriages and deaths from 1837 till 1910 in the UK. I also discovered a web site called 1837online which provides full details of BMD from 1837 each quarter albeit at a cost. This also led to FreeCEN which had census details prior to 1901. I found genealogy sites in Australia and for individual counties in England and was able to confirm Henry Beaufort GRIMALDI, Stacey's dad, had served as a curate at St. Giles in Sidbury, Devon. In discovering this I was informed of Crockfords Clerical Directory and that this was available in larger libraries. As a result I visited my local central library and found Crockfords and confirmed details about Stacey's dad, an uncle and a brother all of whom were clergymen. The main finding in the library however was the microfiche listings of all BMDs in the UK from 1837. Scanning these I found my man had died in Paddington, London in the last quarter 1952. Armed with these details I was able to obtain a copy of his death certificate showing the date of death as 28/11/1952, cause of death and address. Latterly I discovered a software programme called Legacy which is free and I started inputting my results into this tool. I can save photos, web pages and keep notes of findings, as well seeing the family tree in various views. And that is where I am today. I have some leads to follow and will need to arrange some searching in South Africa as I have been unable to discover a marriage in the UK although I know his wife's name from Rosemary's research in the PMB archive. It has been an exciting journey and the people I have contacted by e-mail have all been very helpful. Rosemary has mentored me, and answered all my questions even though some of my e-mails have been more like thinking aloud. URL's of web sites: http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints http://freecen.rootsweb.com/cgi/search.pl Searches census returns for 1841 - 1891 (UK) http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/ Searches Births, Marriages and Deaths 1837 - 1910 (UK) http://www.genealogy.com/index_n.html Genealogy site with message boards http://www.1901census.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ the 1901 census http://www.genuki.org.uk/contents/ UK and Ireland genealogy gives county information etc. http://www.1837online.com Lists of BMD from 1837 to date
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