I am currently researching the ancestry of my nephews part of whose family are Anglo-Indian. This has been a whole new experience for me as up until now all my research has been in the UK and Ireland.
Having said that many of the resources I needed are actually available via the British Library holdings for India, as Anglo-Indians tend to be Christian and therefore are recorded on the British India Office Ecclesiastical Returns. These are available on Find My Past and can be searched with a standard UK membership. I have found however that it’s useful as always to select the database before searching. As this prevents having problems with getting too many results from England.
The current databases available are:
| British India Office Army & Navy Pensions | Regimental & Service Records |
| British India Office Assistant Surgeons | Professions |
| British India Office Births & Baptisms | Parish Baptisms |
| British India Office Deaths & Burials | Parish Burials |
| British India Office Marriages | Parish Marriages |
| British India Office Wills & Probate | Wills & Probate |
FIBIS
One resource not to be with out is the “Families in British India” society. They are specialist Family Historian Society and have one of the best documented and easy to navigate sites and their membership cost is very reasonable.
One great resource is the wonderful Wiki can help understand the places where people lived and were buried. Making it easy to find the modern Indian names for the places listed in the documents from the 19th century and earlier.
They have an excellent database, some of which was used to build the Find My Past indexes I believe, but also includes extracts from newspapers and other miscellaneous documents which have proved invaluable in my research.
Visit https://www.fibis.org/ for more information.
Franco-Indian Research
Having tracked the the male line back to a Sergeant in the 69th (South Lincolnshire) Regiment of Foot in 1835, my next challenge is the female line of Indo-French who came from Pondicherry. There are records available, but my big challenge, they are all in French. There is a family rumour this line is descended from French aristocracy, which I suspect is correct, but currently I am along way from proving it.
A contact on geneanet was kind enough to recommend a couple of sources for this
- Gallica – A gallery of wonderful objects
- National Archives of Overseas (ANOM) – Indo-French Contracts of Marriage , Baptisms and more in French