Waymark Project

About

Why an archive, and why so small

Families from Bengal often know their desh, the home village, by name only. The records that explain it, such as the colonial district gazetteers, the 1901 and 1911 censuses and the land surveys, are scattered across digital libraries and hard to find if you don't know their titles. This site gathers the useful ones in one place, with a short note on why each matters.

The archive has two jobs. The first is a reading room: a catalog of pre-1931 books on Bengal, with the full text of some of them hosted here. The second is a records guide. Family research usually begins with a document in hand, such as a birth registration, an ID or a land record, so the guide explains what those records tell a researcher and points to the official office that holds each one. It uses the old sources to explain the places and terms found on a family's papers.

Colonial-era sources are primary evidence, not neutral truth. Where a book's framing of caste, religion or race is dated, its card says so.

How it started

I have been researching my own family's lineage for some time. That work showed me how much of a family's story sits in records that are hard to find: district gazetteers, censuses, land surveys and old books held in libraries in Kolkata, Dhaka and Baltimore, and papers written in Bengali, Persian, Arabic and Urdu.

Along the way I kept meeting the same obstacles any family would: not knowing which district a village belonged to, what an unfamiliar legal term meant, or which office holds the official record today. I started this project as a tangent from my own research, to turn what I was learning into something other people could use.

It is meant as a free public service and a place for learning: a reading room of public-domain books, a records guide, and a careful way to share family papers when a family agrees. Everything here shows where it came from and how it was checked.

Areeb Uzzaman, founder

Who runs it

The Bengal Heritage Archive is the first program of the Waymark Project, an independent, volunteer-run project; incorporation in progress. It is run by one volunteer, Areeb Uzzaman, with no paid staff and no funding. We are working toward a small board and will say so here when that changes.

Questions, corrections and offers of papers go to archive@areebuzzaman.com.

The person behind it

Areeb Uzzaman is a policy researcher and operations professional. He holds a Master of Public Affairs from Brown University and a B.S. in International Business from the University of Maryland, and the Project Management Professional (PMP), Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I) credentials. His professional portfolio is at areebuzzaman.com, where readers can check his background for themselves.

Before this site, he carried out independent archival research on his own family's history, working with libraries in Kolkata, Dhaka and Baltimore. The portfolio describes that project. This archive grew out of it.

The archive is an independent volunteer project. It is not an activity of any employer, university or organization named on his portfolio.

What we do and don't do

We do

  • Catalog and host public-domain books about Bengal, with notes on their context.
  • Explain what family records contain and which official office holds each one.
  • Scan and return family papers, and publish only what the family approves.

We don't

  • Give legal advice, or act as an agent or lawyer for anyone.
  • Handle fees, original documents, ID numbers or payments.
  • Accept donations, sell anything, or track visitors.

Sources and partners

We have no formal partnerships or sponsors yet. Our catalog depends on the free scans of the Internet Archive, the Digital Library of India (hosted on the Internet Archive) and Project Gutenberg. If you run a library, archive or community group and want to work together, write to us.

Standards

How we decide what goes on this site

Rights

  • Only works first published in 1930 or earlier, which are in the public domain in the United States. Authors of the listed books also died long enough ago to be out of copyright in India and Bangladesh.
  • Later reprints and new editions are not used, because they can carry new copyright in introductions or typesetting.
  • Modern books and articles are never posted without written permission from the author or heirs.

People and privacy

  • Family papers and photographs are shared only with the family's written consent.
  • We leave out the names, addresses and faces of living people unless they agree in writing.
  • Anyone can ask us to remove an item, and we take it down.

Accuracy and context

  • Every card names its source and the rights basis. We say when we have not verified a scan.
  • Colonial sources get a context note. We present them as evidence of what officials believed, not as settled fact.
  • Corrections are welcome. Write to us with the call number, and we fix the card and note the date.

How to cite this archive

Cite the original work first, then the archive's call number and the address of the page you used. For example:

Allen, B. C. Dacca. Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers, 1912. Waymark Project, Bengal Heritage Archive, call no. BHA·GAZ·1912·01. Scan: archive.org/details/daccaallen00alle. Accessed (date you viewed it).

To cite the site itself: Waymark Project. Bengal Heritage Archive. waymark.areebuzzaman.com. Accessed (date you viewed it).

Call numbers are made of the theme (GAZ, HIS, MAP, SOC, LIT, READ or FAM), the year of publication, and a running number.

Status and plans

The archive is an independent, volunteer-run project. We plan to add more scanned volumes after checking each one, a lawyer-reviewed donor consent form for family papers, and more glossary entries. The governance page sets out the project's purpose, activities and the status of its legal documents, and will say so if the project later incorporates and is recognized as a charity, along with who sits on the board.

Accessibility

The site is plain HTML. It works with a keyboard and a screen reader, adjusts to light and dark settings, and scales to phone screens. The hosted PDFs are page scans, and their machine-read text may contain errors. If something does not work for you, write to archive@areebuzzaman.com and we will fix it or send you the item in another form.

Method

How each entry is checked

Every item goes through the same five steps. A card shows only what has been done, and we say plainly what has not.

1. Identify

Find the work in a library catalog, such as the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg, and confirm its identifier, title, creator and date. Done for every entry in the catalog.

2. Check rights

Record the year of first publication. We accept only works first published in 1930 or earlier, and we skip later reprints and new editions.

3. Inspect the scan

Open the scan and check that the title page matches the record. Note stamps, missing pages and watermarks. Done for the five Reading room works. In progress for the rest of the catalog.

4. Describe

Write the card in our own words: why the book matters, and a context note where a colonial source frames people in ways that are now discredited.

5. Correct

When a reader or we find a mistake, we fix the card and add a dated line to the log below.

What we have not checked

  • We have not searched the HathiTrust, Bangladesh National Archives or Banglapedia catalogs.
  • We have not read every page of every catalog scan, so some may have missing or unreadable pages.
  • The searchable text inside scanned PDFs is machine-read and can contain errors.
  • Government gazetteers have no named author. We treat them as public domain by their date, but no rights statement appears on the scan pages.

Corrections

Changes and corrections log

To report a mistake, email archive@areebuzzaman.com with the call number on the card and what is wrong. Each fix is listed here with its date.

  • 24 Oct 2026. Eastern Bengal Ballads, Vol. 4 (1932) was left out because it was published after 1930. Volumes 1 and 2 are listed.
  • 24 Oct 2026. Our copy of A Grammar of the Arabic Language (1873) has only three pages. It is labeled an excerpt.
  • 24 Oct 2026. A 1938 Calcutta University printing of the same grammar was not used. We use the 1873 edition to avoid rights questions in later additions.
  • 24 Oct 2026. Riyazu-s-Salatin is not listed because we have not found a single clean scan of it.

Privacy

What we collect: nothing from the site

This site has no analytics, no cookies, no forms and no ads. Our host may keep ordinary server logs, as any web host does. If you email us, we use your message only to reply, and we do not share it. Please do not email ID numbers, financial details or scans of identity documents.

Last updated and changes

Last updated: 24 October 2026

  • 24 Oct 2026: hosted PDFs for all Internet Archive catalog books; added glossary, privacy note, consent form draft and sources notes.
  • 24 Oct 2026: added the method, corrections log and a note on who runs the archive.
  • 24 Oct 2026: first version of the site.