Resources for those researching British families in India

If you are searching for ancestors who lived in British India, you may find some of their birth, marriage and death records at FamilySearch. Put the family surname, and India under country name at the top of the search engine, and you may well find useful resources. You also may find it useful to do a 'parent search', which will bring up the names of all children born to a particular couple (at least the ones whose records were listed) as well as marriages of those children. In this case, you simply put in the parental surname at the top and then the names of the parents at the bottom of the search engine (you can put in a country name i.e India, but you also can leave country name blank, which may bring up references to a couple in another country - if they returned to the UK, for example).
Other useful resources include FIBIS, the Families in British India Society, and the India Office records of the British Library

 

FIBIS has a good search feature to find mentions of (very nearly only) British in India. It not only gives you BMDs but also other mentions: ships, bonds, and others. Fibiwiki, also on the site, gives good information as a starting point to put some colour and detail on the bare bones of your family tree.

 

I teach family history research at the University of the Third Age and I've just provided 'British India' links to my class members, and which I'm happy to share here:
· Families in British India Society
· British Library – India Office
· British India BMD Records
· India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka)
· FamilySearch
· British India Family History
· British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia
· BBC Family History in India Next Steps
· Thackers-and other-Directories (very useful website with lots of links)
· 1861 Worldwide Army Index
· Travel & migration records - Includes five databases for India.
· The Indiaman Magazine on Facebook

• http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline
• http://www.ancestry.co.uk - Indian Army Quarterly List 1912 (subscription).
• The National Archives of India.
• Indian gazettes

 

Have we included Indian Army Officer 1939-1945? Rather limited scope but has some useful stuff.