Chittlehampton 
Contents & Search Chittlehampton Contents & Search
| In 1997/8 the author contributed to the local monthly village
magazine of Chittlehampton in North Devon, a series of family trees
of local families living in the parish during the nineteenth
century, anticipating that there might be some feed back from
readers to augment what was already known about the families from
traditional sources. A descendant of one such family, the Facey
family of Gambuston in Chittlehampton, came forward with the
information that a member of that family had a copy of a diary
written by a Peter Facey. The diary was said to cover the period
from 1803 to 1820 and described his adventures in the Napoleonic
Wars. The diary was eventually produced - it was an early photocopy
of text in very small writing. It was the diary of Sergeant Peter
Facey, although the owner of the diary did not know how Peter
fitted in to the family, and he wasn't included on the family tree.
After some research the relationship between the writer of the diary and the farming family of Gambuston was established and that he was a younger brother of John Facey, from whom the owner of the diary was descended. It is not clear from the text when the diary was written; whether the events were recorded at the time, or if it was produced from memory after he returned from the campaigns - probably a mixture of both. After reading the diary one wonders how a sergeant came by such detailed knowledge of casualties and of stores captured unless he was attached to the military command in some capacity. Also how he came to have the education and vocabulary necessary to write such an interesting account of his adventures. |
 |
In transcribing the diary no attempt has been made to correct his grammar or spellings of place names. There are some gaps resulting from the poor quality of the photocopying, and one missing section (a page had been torn out!). Since the original contained no punctuation marks, these have been added.
For convenience the transcript is divided into seven chapters, each interlinked.
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7.
Colleytown, Chittlehampton.
This page last updated on 15 Jul 2004
| Note: The information provided by GENUKI must not be used for commercial purposes, and all specific restrictions concerning usage, copyright notices, etc., that are to be found on individual information pages within GENUKI must be strictly adhered to. Violation of these rules could gravely harm the cooperation that GENUKI is obtaining from many information providers, and hence threaten its whole future. |