TRACKING LOST STORIES
A newly launched website uses old pictures and stories to track south Asian family trees
“A lot of our traffic comes from India. And I definitely think and hope that the site will help reunite people who have lost touch due to the IndoPak partition. The event is only 65 years old and many of our grandparents have lived through it. I created this site because I wanted to build bridges between communities and countries,” says Mir.
We humans, are an inherently curious species — our urge to question and explore is infinite. And yet, in spite of the many things that we have managed to find out about ourselves, there are certain aspects of our pasts that are tough to track. Cashing in on this trend is former BBC journalist, Saima Mir, who has created a site that allows South Asians to track their lineage.
Titled whosthedaadi.com, the website was born shortly after Mir’s maternal grandmother developed Alzheimer’s. “When I was little, she would tell me stories about her parents, and our history. I never wrote any of them down and then realised that all those tales about
my heritage had just disappeared,” says Mir.
Mir’s family is originally from Srinagar, Kashmir. After partition, her grandparents settled in Karachi, Pakistan. “I would love to maybe trace my long-lost relatives in India or the Sikh elders my greatgrandfather used to describe as his brothers, in a small village near Amritsar, Punjab. That is when the idea to create such a website was born,” she says.
How it works
The crowd-sourcing website allows people to share and cross-reference information. It permits users to upload pictures and bits of personal data about their history. This information is then tagged with names, dates and places to create a database to help users fill in the gaps in each other’s family trees.
Mir insists that the other ancestry websites work fine for western users, but South Asians have no digitalised records of births, deaths and marriages, making it difficult to track our roots. “But we do have photographs and a great tradition of storytelling and oral history, which is what we are tapping into,” she says.
The website is also collaborating with Getty Images, which will share its archives that date back to the 1800s. The website’s archives catalogue thousands of photographs of India and events post and pre-partition.
There’s more
Currently, the website is still in its Beta form and functions only on an invite-only basis. However, if you are interested in signing up, you can always drop Mir an email, and she will then grant you access to the website.
WHY DON’T OTHER WEBSITES WORK FOR INDIANS USUALLY?
Websites like Ancestry.com and Myheritage.com also let you track your family. Some of them are free and some paid. However, most of these are for western users, who have proper digitised records. These websites usually ask you to fill a form with all your known family details and substantiate them with birth, death and marriage certificates. Most Indians, at least those from previous generations, don’t have records like these, apart from some genealogy data.
PRIVACY CONCERNS
Remember, when you are joining a website like this, you are uploading your entire family’s data on to the web. That makes it even more important to choose a trusted network. “On our site, the information provided is used purely for genealogical purposes and not shared with anyone other than users,” says Mir.
MEMORY GAMES
Anusha Yadav started the Indian Memory Project in 2010, which asked people across the country to send in old photographs, letters and stamps. “We would collect at least five pictures and get little anecdotes around them. People would recognise each other in the pictures, and a network was formed,” says Yadav.