Hugh Wilding: “Researching your British railway ancestor in India prior to 1947”
Did one of your railway ancestors go out east to build, run or manage one of the many railways in British India? Have you puzzled over what a tallyman, shunter or platelayer did? Are you puzzled by references to “PWD” or “conductor” in Thacker’s? This talk is a quick introduction to the jargon, occupations and main sources – archival, bibliographic and online – available to ease your journey to family history nirvana!
A former FIBIS Trustee (2009-2017), Hugh Wilding began researching his family roots almost 30 years ago. With an abiding fascination in Britain’s own railway system and the knowledge that his great grandfather was a civil engineer on various railway projects throughout India and Burma, it was inevitable that Hugh’s genealogical focus would alight on railways in the subcontinent. Hugh authored FIBIS Fact File #4, Research sources for Indian Railways, 1845-1947 (2009), and has contributed several articles to the FIBIS Journal.
More recently, while using the Internet to batter down one of those frustrating brickwalls (not Indian!), imagine his delight to discover that, hidden in some genealogical sleuthing to show how Jack Brooksbank was related to Princess Eugenie, another of his lines runs back to Edward III and the Plantagenets! Even more surprising was that in the proof, the investigator quoted Hugh’s own (now defunct) website!
