For Australian family historians weighing up formal study, the University of Tasmania’s Diploma of Family History (course code R2H) remains the only tertiary qualification in the country built specifically around genealogical practice. Having now been running for over a decade, it has built a loyal…
Planters, Rubber, and the Lives Beyond the Cantonments There was a different kind of life lived on the edges of British India, far from the stations and the cantonments and the railway lines. It was the life of the planter, a man who held a…
One Family’s Witness In August 1946, as the British Raj entered its final months, a wave of communal killing swept through Bengal. In Calcutta, perhaps four thousand people died in four days of systematic violence, though some estimates put the number far higher. The event…
How the Lines Built the Anglo-Indian Community When the East India Railway ran its first train out of Howrah in 1854, no one could have imagined that this single line, climbing up the Ganges plain toward Delhi, would become the skeleton on which an entire…
Three families find India through the army In the spring of 1823, a young man named Jonathan Chadwick walked into a recruiting office in Huddersfield and joined the army, as the saying goes, he chose to ‘take the shilling‘. The recruitment papers say he was…
The Burbidges of Northamptonshire In the English Midlands, between the green valleys of the Nene and the Welland, lay a different kind of industrial country than the mills and collieries of the north. Here, farming was the foundation, but laid over it ran a set…
The short life of Joseph Moore junior In 1858 an army surgeon described Joseph Moore as “a very old soldier quite unable to march or to perform any active duty.” The words suggest a man at the end of a long life. Joseph was thirty-eight…
For many years, my great-great-great-grandfather Joseph Moore, was little more than a name in the family tree. We knew only that he had served in India, married there and raised a family, but the details of his life were difficult to recover. A collection of…
A railway family in northern India, 1863–1920 The surviving records of James George Burbidge and Elizabeth Anne Moore place their marriage and the births of their children within the decisive period in which the East Indian Railway became a continuous trunk route from the Calcutta…
Old passports are valuable family history records because they preserve much more than a person’s identity. They record where a person was living when the passport was issued, how they described themselves, and often where they travelled afterwards. My mother’s passport is important for another…