I have been on the British Library‘s list of approved researchers for the Asian and African Studies Reading Room, for some years. In 2012, my introductory guide to the British in India for family historians, Tracing Your British Indian Ancestors, was published by Pen and Sword. Since then there have been some major developments in this area of research. One of the most notable is the digitization of large sections of the India Office Records collection by Find My Past.

Descendants of Europeans and Anglo-Indians who lived in the sub-continent under British rule are now spread widely across the globe. Happily, there are several free and good value online resources that researchers can use to investigate British, European and Anglo-Indian family history in India, Burma, Pakistan or Bangladesh before, and just after, Indian Independence in 1947.

As some ancestors who lived in the subcontinent also travelled more widely in the British Empire and beyond, a number of related resources from outside the boundaries of India may also be useful.

Here follows a list of my favourite websites for researching the British in India online. Some of them will lead you to further research in archives, especially at the British Library or The National Archives. If you cannot access archives in the London area, please contact me to obtain copies of documents.

India Office Family History Search http://indiafamily.bl.uk/UI/

Discovery (from The National Archives; includes material from The British Library that was formerly indexed on Access to Archives www.a2a.org.uk) http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

Families in British India Society (FIBIS; essential database and Wiki resources) http://www.fibis.org/

Family Search https://familysearch.org/

British Association for Cemeteries in South India (BACSA) http://indian-cemeteries.org/bacsa/html/cemetery_records.html

Index to HEIC [Honourable East India Company] Cadets
http://www.ans.com.au/~rampais/genelogy/india/indexes/cadfram.htm

Index to Original Papers, Letters, Photographs, and Manuscripts at the British Library
http://searcharchives.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=1&dstmp=1410528032513&vid=IAMS_VU2&fromLogin=true&fromLogin=true

Historical maps of India  http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~poyntz/India/maps.html

Untold Lives http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/untoldlives/

Kabristan Archives (Ireland, Ceylon & India Genealogy) http://kabristan.org.uk/

For ancestors in Burma, see http://www.angloburmeselibrary.com/index.html

European genealogies for those who lived in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) can be found at the Dutch Burgher Reunion website: http://www.dutchburgherunion.org/genealogy.html

A useful blog on India and Anglo-Indian family history is at http://geneblanchette.wordpress.com/

The Colonial Film Catalogue holds many films of Empire families and of events that took place in British India http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/

Other colonial records, include Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), can be found in the Records of Former Colonial Administrations from The National Archives (TNA).

Gibraltar Archives http://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/gibraltar-archives

Malta Family History http://website.lineone.net/~stephaniebidmead/other%20sites.htm

Ionian Islands Index http://website.lineone.net/~remosliema/Ionian1.htm

East Africa records from TNA ref. RG36 www.thegenealogist.co.uk

Mauritius – Association Maurice Archives http://www.amamu.org/

East India Company at Home 1757-1857 http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/

NewspapersSG has a digital archives of historic newspapers from Singapore and Malaya published between 1831-2009. This resource can be searched at http://newspapers.nl.sg/

Sarah Speedy, Mrs Livingstone, I Presume? Memoirs of Mrs S.M. Speedy, wife of Major James Speedy 1815-1859 (Allan Speedy, 1996) – see www,speedy.co.nz/recollections/

Emma Jolly, ‘Open Access Microfilms in the Asia, Pacific & Africa Collections of the British
Library in the September 2008 edition of The Genealogists’ Magazine – www.sog.org.uk

I regularly post news on this area of research to the Tracing Your British Indian Ancestors Facebook page. Please ‘like’ the page to receive regular updates.

And do read the blogpost on my client Evelyn Nelson’s experiences in India, searching for the church registers of St Stephen’s, Ootacamund (Ooty).