Why we built The Indian Archive

Growing up in the UK as a first-generation British Indian, I often saw other people using genealogy websites to discover their family trees. They could search census records, birth certificates, marriage records and public archives, sometimes tracing their families back for generations.

I always assumed that kind of discovery was not really available to families like mine.

My parents had come directly from India, so I believed any records I might find in the UK would begin with them and perhaps include only a small amount of information about my grandparents. I never imagined that a deeper record of our family existed.

When I thought about India, I thought about the scale of the country, the population, the villages, the movement of families and the sheer complexity of keeping records over generations. I simply did not expect that anyone had been preserving that history.

That changed when I travelled to Haridwar to carry out the final rites for my grandfather.

I went there to scatter his ashes in the River Ganges and complete the prayers and rituals traditionally carried out with a priest. As part of that journey, I was also taken through the process of recording my grandfather's death in our family's ancestral register near Har Ki Pauri.

The priest asked me for details about my family: our ancestral village, family names, community, gotra and other information that could help identify our lineage. Using those details, they began searching through the traditional handwritten registers.

These were not small books. They were long, carefully preserved ledgers, with generations of family information handwritten across large pages. The records were organised through hereditary priests who had looked after particular families, villages and regions over many generations.

Eventually, they found my family. They showed me my grandfather's name. Then they showed me my father's name. From there, they traced the record back to my great-grandfather, then to my great-great-grandfather, and continued even further.

I was told that more than 400 years of my family history had been preserved within those pages.

It was deeply emotional to realise that my history was there. It existed. It had been remembered.

What I saw in Haridwar felt like more than a collection of old books. It felt like a village of libraries, with generations of hereditary record keepers caring for an extraordinary part of India's social and family history.

Thousands of families, villages and lineages had been recorded and preserved by people who understood which priest held which family's history and how each branch connected to the next.

That experience also made me think about how fragile such a system could be. These books contain centuries of family history. If they were damaged, lost or destroyed, an irreplaceable part of many families' identities could disappear with them.

The task of digitising every register across India would be enormous. There are vast numbers of books, families, priests and pilgrimage centres involved. It is not something that can be completed all at once. But every important journey has to begin somewhere.

The Indian Archive was created to help families discover, retrieve, translate and preserve the history that has already been written about them.

Whenever a family register is located through our service, the relevant information can be carefully documented, translated and preserved within a secure digital family archive.

Our aim is not to replace the traditional registers or the hereditary priests who have protected them for generations. Our aim is to help families reconnect with those records, understand what is written within them and preserve their own family history for the generations that come next.