विशीं · About
About this archive
A public, free, permanently open record of families — any family, from any community, wherever in the world it now lives. There is no login, no membership, and no paywall, and there is not going to be one.
Who it is for
Everyone. The archive is not the property of one community and does not keep a section for any of them. Its vocabularies — gotra, kuladevata, mool village, matha — are recorded because they are what households actually remember and what reconnects branches that lost touch, not as a test of who belongs. A family that uses none of them is as welcome as one that uses all four; leave the fields blank and the record still stands.
Where you see a term you do not use, read it as one community’s word for something most families have some version of. The glossary at the foot of this page explains every one of them.
What you are looking at is demonstration data
Every one of the 1,529 people currently in this archive is fictional. They were generated so that the tree, the search and the relationship finder could be built and tested against something realistic before real families trust it with their records.
What is not invented is everything around them. The gotras and their pravaras, the four mathas, the Goan temples and the villages their deities came from, the surname patterns, the patronymic naming convention, the migration route from Goa down the Karavali coast to Bombay and then abroad — those are real, and they are the part that took the work.
To replace it with real records
- 1. Delete
data/people/sample-*.json - 2. Put real records in
data/people/— hand-written JSON, or vianpm run import:gedcomfrom any genealogy program, ornpm run import:csvfrom a spreadsheet - 3. Run
npm run data:check— it catches impossible dates, broken links and ancestry loops
This banner disappears by itself as soon as a single non-sample record is present.
How it is put together
Records are plain JSON files kept in version control. That is an unglamorous choice with one large advantage: every change to every person has an author, a date and a reason attached to it forever. When two cousins disagree about a birth year in 2035, the history will say who claimed what and on what basis. A database row that was quietly edited cannot do that.
The whole archive is loaded into memory when the site starts, because every interesting question here is a graph traversal — six generations of descendants, the path between two people, which families share a kuladevata — and those are answered in microseconds against objects in memory rather than in round trips to a database.
What counts as a source
Everything, as long as it is labelled. A record backed by a municipal register and a record backed by “my grandmother said so” are both worth having; what would ruin the archive is not being able to tell them apart. So every person carries one of four marks:
- Documented
- A register, certificate, gazette entry, horoscope or matha vahi that someone can point to.
- Corroborated
- More than one family member independently says the same thing.
- Family memory
- A single oral account. Usually right about who, looser about when.
- Unverified
- Recorded, but flagged so nobody builds a branch on top of it.
What this record is biased towards
Any genealogy is a record of who got written down, which is never the same as who lived. Three distortions are worth naming out loud, because they shape everything you will see here:
It follows sons
Traditional registers track the male line. A daughter’s children were recorded in her husband’s family, so in her own family’s book her line simply stops — not because it ended, but because it was written down elsewhere. Half the tree is missing at every generation, and it is always the same half. Adding the women’s lines back is one of the most useful things a contributor can do.
It follows literacy and money
Families that kept a vahi, endowed a temple or sent a son to Bombay are over-represented, because those acts left paper. The branch that stayed in the village and farmed is the branch least likely to appear.
It follows whoever is online now
An archive built from submissions grows fastest where its contributors live. Read the diaspora chart as a picture of this archive’s coverage, not of any population.
Living people
Everything here is public and indexed by search engines. That is the point of it, and it is also the risk. The rules are short:
- — Ask a living person before adding them. Their name, year of birth and family links are enough for genealogy.
- — Never submit addresses, phone numbers, exact dates of birth, identity numbers, or anything to do with health, money or a family dispute. These are removed in review.
- — Anyone can ask to be reduced to a name, or removed entirely, and that will be done without argument. Write to the maintainers through the contribute form.
- — Children are recorded as a name and a parent link only, and never with a school, a photograph or a location.
On names and spellings
There is no correct roman spelling of a Konkani name, and pretending otherwise would lose half the matches. Search here folds a name down along the axes that actually vary — aspiration (bh/b, th/t), sibilants (sh/s), long vowels (aa/a, ee/i), v and w, the Sanskrit final -a, and ksh/x — so Shreenivas, Srinivasa, Sreenivas and Shrinivas are one name, and Laxmi finds Lakshmi. Spellings that diverged through different colonial orthographies rather than through pronunciation — Shenoy and Sinai, Kamath and Camotim — are linked by hand.
A short glossary
- Vansh vrikshaवंशवृक्ष
- Family tree — literally 'lineage tree'.
- Gotraगोत्र
- The rishi a patriline descends from. Passed father to child, unchanged by marriage.
- Pravaraप्रवर
- The list of ancestral sages recited with a gotra, usually three or five names.
- Kuladevataकुलदेवता
- The family deity — for many families a specific named temple rather than a deity in general.
- Moolमूळ
- Root — the ancestral village a family names as its origin.
- Mathaमठ
- The monastic seat a family owes allegiance to.
- Vahiवही
- A household ledger. Often the only written record of births and deaths before civil registration.
- Mahajanमहाजन
- A hereditary trustee of a temple, a role attached to particular families.
- Bhanapभानप
- The community's own name for Chitrapur Saraswats.
- Munjiमुंज
- The thread ceremony, upanayana.
- Ajjo / Ajjiआज्जो / आज्जी
- Grandfather / grandmother.
- Mama / Kakaमामा / काका
- Mother's brother / father's younger brother — two different words, two different roles.
The archive is only as good as what people send it
If you have a vahi in a cupboard, a horoscope with a date on it, or an aunt who can still name six generations, that is the rarest material there is. Most of it will be gone within twenty years.
Add what you have