Did your relatives leave the UK ?

Did they have a connection to India? Either in the Army or East India Company – Find My Past have gathered a collection of information that might help in your search.

Fantastic, I found my J Younie in these records working with the Judicial system in Bengal in 1933.  This record was easy to find as all I needed to do was insert his unusual surname.  When looking to see if any other of my far flung lot had a passport… now that opened up another can of worms.

FMP have passport applications from 1851 – 1903 with a few gaps in between, but when entering information into the search boxes they only want the first 3 letters of the surname – making it very time consuming to do a search, especially if your first 3 letters are Mac.  They do have other records in their Migration section. including Passenger listings, that are just as easy to search as the India Office List.  If you find a 3 letter search, just make sure you are in a ‘moochin’ mood so you won’t get frustrated and annoyed looking at every page to find your ‘Mac…’

On the other hand, Ancestry have an Immigration and Travel section which incudes : Alien Arrivals; English Adventurers and Emigrants and UK Incoming Passenger List 1878 – 1960 and all these use a full name search.  Now, how easy is that for the Mac prefix families of the world!

On a more personal note – I use both these websites (well one more than the other) sometimes using one to compliment research gleaned from the other but when it comes down to ease of search, ignoring both their transcriptions errors –  I prefer the  Ancestry  site for its full name search facility.

NOTE :- both Ancestry and Find My Past are pay per view sites, although you can look at some indices for free.