[5] There was more time in college, at Fort William, after which he took the judicial route, one of the two main specialisations for the civil servants of the East India Company.
[4] His first wife died in 1821, in the first cholera pandemic, leaving him with children to bring up, and his sister Mary came out from England to support him.
[5] As a judicial officer, Bird had acquired insight into land ownership in India, and the impact on it of the legal framework.
Retaining his seat as a member of board of revenue recently constituted at Allahabad, he took sole charge of the settlement operations, which he brought to completion by the end of 1841.
A few months before his death, which occurred at Torquay on 22 August 1853, he gave evidence before the committee of the House of Commons on the renewal of the East India Company's charter.
It also included:[5] "the decision and demarcation of boundaries, the defining and recording the separate possession, rights, privileges, and liabilities of the members of those communities who hold their land in severalty; the framing a record of the several interests of those who hold their land in common; the providing a system of self-government for the communities; the rules framed with their own consent according to the principles of the constitution of the different tenures; the preparation of the record of the fields and of the rights of cultivators possessing rights; and the reform of the village accounts and completion of a plan of record by their own established accountants, and according to their own method, by reference to which the above points of possession and right might, under the various changes to which property is subject, continue to be ascertained.
Marmaduke Thompson, who had been in India from 1806 to 1819 as a chaplain nominated by Charles Simeon, returning as a widower to the United Kingdom.
[14][15] William Bell Mackenzie wrote a preface to an edition in 1855 of writings on the Pentateuch, Bible Teaching, by three of Bird's sisters.
It included, but was not limited to, George Campbell (1824–1892), John Russell Colvin, Frederick Currie, Robert Needham Cust, George Frederick Edmonstone, Henry Miers Elliot, John Laird Mair Lawrence, Charles Grenville Mansel, Robert Montgomery, William Muir, Edward Anderdon Reade, Richard Temple, and Edward Parry Thornton.
Of those, Colvin, Cust, Lawrence, Mansel, Montgomery, Muir, Reade, Temple and Thornton are identified as evangelicals.