Tracing ancestors in India

[SunGrins]

Originally Posted by munna21977

It will be in North Arcot District, Madras Presidency at that time. you will have to personally go there and look at old records of british times. You should start your search from Madras (as you know names have been changed-district name changed to Vellore and Madras presidency divided into AP and Tamil Nadu and Madras changed to Chennai). There must be some land records. Those old records are locked up in some godowns and it is india, unless you personally go there and spend some money in govt offices there, they will just make some excuses that records lost due to riots etc.

Speaking from complete ignorance, I just saw an old BBC episode of Who Do You Think You Are on YouTube where a British celebrity was able to trace her Indian ancestry back through several generations by visiting with a priest/scribe at one of the pilgrimage sites. Her family would go to the same family scribe to record each of their pilgrimages -- males only, but they would list themselves as the son of their father and give names and dates. They were able to go back before the arrival of the British in an uninterrupted chain of pilgrimages. I thought that was interesting -- this person had family in India that knew where they would go and who they would see to record their visit. Of course, she had to personally visit and have the scribe look over multiple handwritten scrolls of records. I suspect it was costly. I wonder if that is a rare or common occurrence.

[kitty61]

Originally Posted by Rakhi

All, I am wondering if you can help me with my quest in searching details of my great great grand parents. I know which village/county they are from but I am pretty much stuck there. I called the temple and municipal office in the village and they are telling me that during the Freedom fight and India partition (1947), quite a lot of temples and their records were destroyed. And thats why they do not have any record of my G G grand parents.

How exactly should I proceed now? I have been trying google search with family names, obituary (useless because i don't think newspapers were that prevalent back then).

Edit: I am referring to a small village in south of India.

Forgive my ignorance but I think the British will have records because they occupied India from 1793 to the Freedom Fight in 1947. Your great great grandparents would be alive during that time . I presume ENG would have been collecting information for Census, Marriages, Births, Courts, and I would expect even if those records might have been destroyed duplicates would be on record in a great repository in England after all it was the "mother country".

I recommend using familysearch.org to start recording your tree for free. There is a learning curve. Be patient and never give up.

There could be distant family of yours looking for you as well and you might well find them when researching. familysearch.org have records in many different languages and you can search in the native tongue. A vast number of records contributed by families around the world. There are global government and public projects digitizing data from old records as we speak.

For your purposes and the area of the world you are searching I wouldn't use Ancestry.com. Besides the fact it cost me $40/mo, the majority of their information is based on American immigration but to be fair they have added a vast amount of worldwide data. I used Ancestry for years. There are things about it that you cannot transfer easily from one website to another. And you will find that becomes necessary.
I would also test out French and Dutch records that go much farther back.
Sometimes you might not find the people you are searching for right away but you will find the ancestors of those people. So you can work from farther in the past toward the present instead of the other way around.
I want you to realize the process is not easy and it could be years until you find the gold. Keep at it though. Your descendants will be truly grateful and your heritage will live on.