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British India Office Records

SarahLC

SarahLC

Genealogy in the Sunshine 2015
I've been having a good time looking for a side branch of my family in the British India Office Records on Findmypast, but have run into a frustrating problem. I found the index entry for the will of a William Fraser, signed in 1826 and probated in 1830 and clicked on the image button to download it. Although the will is supposed to begin on page 89 of the book, the image that comes up is page 92 and is obviously in the middle of the will. There is no "previous" button to click so I have no way to see the first few pages. I sent them a contact form about it 9 days ago and have still not heard back. Is this normal? I believe when I sent the message I was told that they attempt to answer within 48 hours, but this has long passed.

Does anyone know a trick for accessing those first few pages? As far as I can tell, there is no way to search for a volume and page, nor is it possible to browse the records. It is very likely that I have missed something, since I have always found it extremely difficult to navigate FMP and frequently give up in frustration and go back to Ancestry. I'm hoping that some of you dedicated FMP users will know a trick or two to help me out.

Thanks!
 
I was having this problem too with all of the wills.

I can't remember exactly how I did it now, but I did use the info from the FMP index to order a copy from FamilySearch via their document ordering system, as they have also filmed the various Indian wills - I think I searched the FS catalogue to find the matching film number for the year and presidency.
 
SarahLC said:
I've been having a good time looking for a side branch of my family in the British India Office Records on Findmypast, but have run into a frustrating problem. I found the index entry for the will of a William Fraser, signed in 1826 and probated in 1830 and clicked on the image button to download it. Although the will is supposed to begin on page 89 of the book, the image that comes up is page 92 and is obviously in the middle of the will. There is no "previous" button to click so I have no way to see the first few pages. I sent them a contact form about it 9 days ago and have still not heard back. Is this normal? I believe when I sent the message I was told that they attempt to answer within 48 hours, but this has long passed.

Does anyone know a trick for accessing those first few pages? As far as I can tell, there is no way to search for a volume and page, nor is it possible to browse the records. It is very likely that I have missed something, since I have always found it extremely difficult to navigate FMP and frequently give up in frustration and go back to Ancestry. I'm hoping that some of you dedicated FMP users will know a trick or two to help me out.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Can you post a link to the page that you get to here? When this happens to me, I normally edit the web address in an attempt to find previous or next pages.
 
Thanks to both of you for your helpful responses.

Suzanne, somehow I never thought of an FS film, having only ever seen these documents before at the British Library! But I see that indeed, they do have those films (of course!)

Tim, here is the link copied from the page it gives me (92-93):
http://search.findmypast.com/record...d=bl/bind/l-ag-24-29/will/11422&highlights=""

If you can figure out how I should alter that to go back one or two pages, I would be delighted!
 
Yes, I eventually found out how to find the page you were looking at.

I also looked at other entries from the same book but couldn't work out any logical sequence, sorry.
I have reported it though.
 
Thanks for trying. I hope you get more of a reaction to your reporting than I did. At least with two people reporting the same problem, it should give it more weight.
 
Over three months later and still no word from Findmypast, nor any improvement in the index > image relationship. I have reported it again, but have no great hopes. Should my subscription expire before they have corrected the problem, do you think they are likely to let me see that image free? Probably too much to hope.
 
SarahLC said:
Over three months later and still no word from Findmypast, nor any improvement in the index > image relationship. I have reported it again, but have no great hopes. Should my subscription expire before they have corrected the problem, do you think they are likely to let me see that image free? Probably too much to hope.
Click to expand...
You're right! I'd forgotten all about it!!!
 
Over a year later, I'm still trying to get Findmypast to make the correct link for that will... On 27 January I sent another contact form, informing them that I had contacted them on this issue twice before and asking if they could at least do me the courtesy of acknowledging same. This finally got a response on the same day:

Dear Sarah, Thank you for your e mail.We are sorry but we have not received any previous e mails from you regarding this issue.We have checked the record and have been able to replicate the issue you have reported.We have reported this to our technical team for further investigation.We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.With kind regards,

So, not surprisingly, they have been able to replicate the issue-- but seem unable or unwilling to find the time to do anything about it. Surely it is simply a matter of changing the link to point to the earlier page? Or am I missing some great technical problem here that requires "further investigation?" Similar issues with documents at ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk were taken care of within a day or two and often with the correct image personally emailed to me by their support team. Why does Findmypast not care about customer service?

I don't use Twitter or other social media, or I would be tempted to do as Mike suggested above.
 
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