Brides' marriages in India
at the British Library

Grooms are indexed at British Library. Brides are indexed (or not) as follows. All the indexes which are being transcribed are available not only at the British Library, but on microfilm through the LDS Family History Centres.   No - there are churches where b/m/d have not been filmed by LDS e.g. Holy Trinity, Karachi.  Many b/m/d events occurred 1698 - 1948 but are not lsited at BL.

** Pat Page has not responded to email messages for a couple of months, and evidently her Bengal marriage index pages are now down too. She was moving house and foresaw an interruption.... There was a recent message on the India List saying that she was reading messages but not receiving....In any event, you will find posted on the India List all the 1865-73 material that she had posted on her site, plus the letters A-F.  So the missing letters are G-M.

Those looking for brides in the "yet to be done" category have two options, both of which require enormous patience:

1. Go through every Marriage register (Bengal A-B, etc from 1698 to 1854, etc) at the OIOC (Oriental & India Office Collections) on 3rd floor of the British Library looking at the bride's surname on the right hand side of the page. .....Some names have missed getting into the indexes, or have been mis-transcribed in the first place, so searching can be useful in some cases. But, the actual registers contain groups of baptisms, groups of marriages and groups of burials for specific locations all in the same volume - so there are different browsing techniques depending on where you are looking.

2. Wait until the noble volunteers have finished going through the films taking (expensive) photocopies along the way, created searchable data bases and generously made them available to everyone, then make a note of the reference number and either go to London or order in the relevant film at your LDS. Or volunteer to help them, the FIBIS (Families in British India Society) committee would be delighted to coordinate the best place for you to assist. 

The complete (both brides and grooms) searchable Bengal marriage indexes indexes for 1865-73 and 1874-96 are not yet available, but they should be at some point soon.    Still working on the 1865-73 index, with about 20-25 per cent unfinished, and the complete index 1874-96 index was sent to Cathy Day many weeks ago, so it should appear on her website soon.

You may wish to know that FIBIS is currently working on the presentation on their site of hosts of India Office Records transcribed by Members and Volunteers. These records should be fully searchable. They make no promise of a date when they will be available but say preliminary testing of the site is now very promising.  Among the data available will be Kerrie Farmer's transcription of the Madras Marriage Index (1851-1870). These data have been transmitted to the "India List" and should be found in the Archives (details above).  Also included in the FIBIS databases will be the Birth, Marriage and Death announcements in the East India Registers (1809-1842) which amount to some 40,000 individual entries. Large numbers of these seem to have escaped the N/ series records in the IOR and so represent particularly valuable additions to the resources available to family historians, particularly those without easy access to the major Libraries.  ..... Peter Bailey (Sec, FIBIS).

If you are looking for a specific surname, the following table may help.  If you are gathering all the people during a specific period from a particular index or all the people in all the indices from a particular period below, let us know and we will mention it.

N/1/RC, N/2/RC, N/3/RC Roman Catholic returns for each Presidency 1835-1854
N/11 Registrar marriages in India and Burma 1852-1911
N/4 Post Independence India and Pakistan
N/5 Indian States 1890-1947
N/1 Burma pre-1936
N/10 Burma 1937 -
N/6 St Helena 1767-1835
N/7 Fort Marlborough (Benkulen, Sumatra) 1759-1825
N/8 Prince of Wales Island (Penang) Malacca and Singapore 1799-1829
N/1 (The above continued in Bengal returns 1830-1868; for Malacca marriages 1820-1824 see also R/9/39/3)
N/9 Macao and Whampoa (Canton) 1820-1833
N/12 Kuwait 1937-1961

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