José Maria Braga or Jack Braga, as he was known, was born on the 22nd of May of 1897, in Hong Kong, where he was educated in St. Joseph's College. His great-grandfather had settled in Hong Kong, right after the occupation of that territory by the English, and his father, Jose Pedro Braga, a member of the Macanese community of the then English colony, married an Australian woman, Olive Pauline Kollard, who arrived in Hong Kong in 1890.
Jack Braga, on the other hand, was a well-known businessman in Hong Kong but, in the 1920s, settled in Macau, and here he married, in 1924, Augusta Isabel da Conceição Ósorio da Luz. After World War II, he returned to Hong Kong and, afterwards, emigrated to Australia, where he continued his studies and research until his retirement, at 75 years of age. After, he went to San Francisco (USA) with his wife and went to live with their eldest daughter. Here he came to pass away on the 27th of April of 1988, at the age of 90 years old.
Jack Braga left behind a large collection of books, manuscripts, maps, pictures, journals and magazines. His collection was sold to the National Library of Australia, in Canberra, in 1966, but he was invited by this Library to work there, to organize his own bibliographic collection (1968 and 1972), creating the Portuguese section in that library.