Joseph Borg was born in Hamrun and migrated with his family to Australia. He later returned to Malta and became a genealogist.

Apart from this professional interest, there was also a personal reason which led him to research and write this book: among the people he writes about, no less than seven couples have been traced as forefathers of his family.

This book is about the troglodyte inhabitants of Ghar il-Kbir (the Great Cave) which can still be visited just off the cart ruts named the Clapham Junction by the British, not far from Buskett, Rabat and Dingli.

It has been proved that the first stage of residence in Malta was in caves around the island. Then, the caves were adapted to more habitable units through the use of tools and later the people moved out from the caves into the first humble dwellings. There are still such caves around the countryside which are today used as stores for farmers, etc.

But among the cave dwellings, that of Ghar il-Kbir was famous not just because of its dimensions but also because of the amount of people who lived there.

This book tells us about those persons who lived in the cave between 1588 and 1733 as derived from the marriage contracts drawn up by notaries even at that time.

It is not clear what moved those persons to live there. Maybe they were descendants of earlier inhabitants who happened to reside there and knew no alternative to that. The fact that they used notaries and were thus cognizant of legal practice shows they did not form an enclave different from the rest of the country.

The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who visited the cave in the company of Grand Master Lascaris in 1637, says they were Catholics and heard Mass in one of the nearby villages. So they were not relics of a pagan past living their lives in self-imposed internal exile.

The only exception Kircher noted was their reluctance to eat meat since for them the animals they kept were used to provide them with money when they sold them off. This was something the grand master laughed at as quaint.

Kircher also says there was a similar residence over in Gozo but the book does not explain further.

Giovanni Francesco Abela, writing in 1647, says 117 persons lived in the cave, forming 27 families. The author seriously doubts such an exaggerated figure.

Quite understandably, residence at such closed quarters made the group a rather closed one. In fact, 15 out of the 18 marriages examined in this book related to others in this same group. In many cases, brothers or sisters married outsiders or married new residents' brothers or sisters. The map of the relationships shows a network of a closely inter-related community.

The first marriage contract dates to May 1588 and already right from the beginning of this selection one notes that residents of the Cave got married to people outside the Cave, in this case from Rabat.

Later, other came to live in the Cave through marriage from places such as Rabat, Zebbug, Lija, Qormi, Mosta, Siggiewi, etc.  From all 18 marriages, only two were between residents of the Cave on both sides.

Many of the contracts were drawn outside the Cave, mostly at the notary's including at least one in Mdina, but there were cases where the document was drawn up in the Cave itself.

The marriage contracts were made to ensure what each partner was giving and receiving, property and goods, so that if the marriage broke up, each could demand what he or she put into the marriage. Generally, it was the parents who were pledging on behalf of the spouses, and they pledged items which ranged from property to clothes and utensils.

In other words, some at least of the Cave's residents owned property. The book lists no less than 35 properties relating to these 18 marriages, ranging from plots to caves.

Of these 35 plots, 10 were situated in the neighbourhood of the Cave and 16 at a moderate distance from the Cave. Of course, some of these plots could have been those donated by the families of the outsiders who married into the Cave.

Apart from the plots, the marriage dowries included such things as animals (from cows to pigeons), clothes (from bed gowns to under-vests), various cloths such as bedspreads and even handkerchiefs, decorations such as chains of pearls, furniture (chairs and tables), utensils (from bed-pans to carriages to mattresses).

These contracts are by no means the only ones that relate to the Cave, since Mr Borg has traced more contracts at the Notarial Archives than just these.

These documents were then transcribed and translated by Prof. Horatio Caesar Roger Vella.

The book also includes copies of the contracts themselves, written in undeciphrable script, mostly in Latin which sometimes slid into Italian or Sicilian.