Autumn Open Meeting

Programme for the Day

1000 – 1100 hrs: FIBIS Bitesize.  A new section to the open meetings with short presentations offering ‘bitesize’ advice to genealogists.  This meeting we will look at:

• Top tips for making a research visit to a library or archive by Karen de Bruyne.
• Researching the Honourable East India Company’s maritime service’s records by Dr Richard Morgan.
• Understanding Indian Army ranks Part 1 by Mike Tickner.

1100 – 1200 hrs:  The Development of Railways in India 1832-1951

As in Britain, the first railways in India were associated for industry rather than passenger transport.  Developing a passenger and freight networks occurred towards the end of the 1840s and was inspired by Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General and a former President of the (British) Board of Trade.  Dalhousie created a network which developed during the British Raj through to the establishing Indian Railways in 1951.

Hugh Wilding is a former FIBIS trustee and began researching his family roots 30 years ago.  With an abiding fascination in Britain’s own railway system and the knowledge that his great grandfather was a railway civil engineer in India and Burma, it was inevitable that Hugh’s focus would alight on railways of the sub-continent. 

1200 – 1300 hrs:   Lunch    

1300 – 1400 hrs: ‘Little atoms of humanity’: Christian missions to blind and deaf children in nineteenth and early twentieth-century India and Ceylon.  

In 1915, the missionary Gladys Bergg wrote to her supporters back home about the blind and deaf children under her care in Ceylon.  She wrote of the children at the blind and deaf mission, ‘several of these have only just been admitted into the school and are the most charming little atoms of humanity!’  This talk explores the work of British missionaries amongst disabled South Asian children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thinking through the complex dynamics of race, gender, religion and disability in the way in which these children were treated and understood. 

Dr Esme Cleall is a senior lecturer in the history of the British Empire at the University of Sheffield. She has published two monographs, one on missionaries and the other on disability history, interests which this talk brings together. 

*** Please register your intention to attend the meeting on the FIBIS website.  Names are required in advance by the Union Jack Club for security purposes. ***

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ALL WELCOME.  ADMISSION FREE