Domestic Occurrences

In a fashion similar to Birth, marriage and death announcements in the newspapers of today, in the 19th century it was often the custom to make such announcements in the Domestic Occurrences section of publications. Accordingly, for British India, a significant number are to be found in newspapers/journals and almanacs/directories. It should be recognized that such announcements were often made some two years after the event.

A list of Directories online links to directories and almanacs available to read on sites such as Google Books. Quarterly and monthly publications are listed in Newspapers and journals online

Titles - especially those for women - in Domestic Occurences would usually concur with the accepted Order of Precedence - i.e Officers and their Ladies; NCOs and their Wives; Other ranks and their Women. The definitions were also extended to non military circles where professional or wealthy business men would rank higher in the social scale than some others. Although the Editor of the publication would have printed what he had been sent, submitted entries were unlikely to have strayed too far from the accepted protocol for fear of upsetting social conventions.

FIBIS resources

Domestic Occurences transcribed and available on FIBIS Search:

• Allen's Indian Mail 1843-ongoing. Currently (March 2014) entries to 1878 have been transcribed.
• Gentlemans Magazine 1731-1850
• Bombay Almanac 1806-1867
• East India Register 1809-1844
• South Africa Commerical Advertiser 1826-1840
• Times of India an ongoing transcription project of the Times of India Domestic Occurrences, already containing many thousands of records.
• Times of London deaths relevant to India. Complete years: 1785-1804, 1816, 1851, 1854.

Also see

• Newspapers

External links

• India List post by Noel Clark dated 29 November 2013 advises that Ancestry (a pay site) has a database "England, Andrews Newspaper Index Cards, 1790-1976", part of Newspapers and Periodicals. "It is possible to search this database for "colonial" entries just using the "keyword" field. No personal name is required. So, for example, it is possible to find all the notices that refer to India, Pakistan etc., to a specific place, such as Simla, Murree, etc."