Did any of your ancestors spend even a small amount of time in India? You might be surprised at just how many did! For more than 50 years our family considered my gg-grandfather, James NIALL (photo), to have told porkies. To be honest we used much stronger language to describe the records we had found and more importantly the records we hadn’t! Basically we could not find a skerrick of evidence to support his claims to his son or his grandsons.
That was until I became more familiar with the resources of FIBIS – Families in British India Society. We have now totally rewritten James NIALLs life history!
You could also have his amazing breakthrough!
Come along tomorrow night, Wednesday 26th June, at 7.30 pm for our Geelong Family History Group meeting. Visitors are welcome.
Our guest speaker from Melbourne is Mary-Anne GOURLEY who is the Australian representative of FIBIS. Find out just how much you can do on the FIBIS website – even as a non-member.
Geelong and District 
In addition to FIBIS, there’s also the British Library’s India Office Family History Search (https://indiafamily.bl.uk/UI/Home.aspx) and also Find My Past. Often there are records at one that aren’t at the others. I used all three to trace the descendants of my great-grandfather’s 1st cousin.
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