Our family history
What the four source documents record, and how they were brought together into a single tree.
Four documents, one family
This archive began as four hand-drawn Urdu shajra documents — twenty sheets in total. Each sheet draws a tree that grows upward from the earliest ancestor at its base, with leaf-shaped nodes fanning out above each person to hold their sons.
Every one of the twenty sheets repeats the same six generations at its base. That shared spine is what allows four separate documents to be merged into a single family tree rather than four disconnected ones.
Where the line divides
- The apex ancestorbase of every sheet
- Five further generationsidentical on all twenty sheets
- The line divides
two sons begin the four branches recorded today
How it was reconstructed
The relationships in these documents are drawn, not written: which stem joins which leaf is the evidence. Each sheet was read node by node and connector by connector, and the resulting structure was checked for consistency across every sheet.
Where two sheets record the same person differently, both readings are preserved and the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved. Where the handwriting could not be read at the resolution of the available scans, the person is kept — their position in the tree is certain — and the name is marked as pending verification. No name was ever invented to fill a gap.