Collections · A guide to the archive
Follow migration, military service, village records and testimony through their different evidentiary purposes.
Begin with the name, place and approximate date you can document. The passenger and military guides explain how to choose a relevant record set and recognise its coverage. A settlement-report example shows the limited purpose of an administrative genealogy; the oral-history guide and essays introduce the separate questions raised by memory and a surname. Use each source to ask the next specific question while retaining uncertainty about a match.
An intentional selection
Find the relevant ship record by port, direction and date, and recognise the limits of British, Canadian and shipping-company collections.
Follow British Indian Army catalogue references, Punjab village registers and commemoration records without confusing their coverage or treating a missing name as proof of no service.
Locate historical Punjab settlement reports and use a Rohtak example to distinguish the printed report, village record and limited administrative genealogy.
A reproduced family card, a historical land-claim judgment and an archive holdings entry show why refugee registration records need to be identified by purpose and issuing authority.
Distinguish public excerpts from research access, read the archive’s current conditions, and preserve an interview’s context and permissions.
A remembered event, a recorded interview and its written transcript are separate records. Later concerns, the interviewer’s questions and editorial choices all affect how an experience is presented.
A surname claim becomes unreliable when it replaces dated evidence about a particular family with a universal story inferred from the modern spelling.
How we use sources, explain uncertainty and correct mistakes.
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