Back to the Beginning

The exercise,she says,is a convenient way to tell her children about their family. We were fortunate to grow in a joint family. But now,my children hardly know their relatives,which is why I take out time to update our family tree. It doesnt end at the tree. One can also chat and share pictures with far-off family members by following them on Twitter or Facebook,as geni.com provides such options.

There are other family-tree-building online platforms such as rootsweb.com. On the message board on the wesbite,Gerard Joseph,who was born in Pune in October 1982, asks for help in finding her biological parents. Her message reads,I was born in Sassoon Hospital and was adopted through an agency called SOFOSH. My name prior to adoption was Pallavi. I am looking for my birth mother…. Josephs post dates to May 2002 and has been updated twice after that.

You can also download genealogy software such as GenPro. Hilary Jacob,a 48-year-old Anglo-Indian media professional from Nashik,caught the family tree bug when his cousin,Dunstan Ganble,from Jabalpur,received an email from someone in Australia who told him how they were related The Australian relative had read Ganbles article in an Anglo-Indian magazine called Anglos in the Wind,which is also circulated in Australia,and found out his email address. Jacob was inspired by the incident and surfed the internet for more such options. He chanced upon Genpro,a family mapping software,and downloaded it. GenPro is quite elaborate,allowing you to punch in photographs,date of birth,profession and other biographical details of your family members. I think it8217;s a great way to connect with your far-off relatives but it requires effort,time and determination, says Jacob,who has,in the past six months,only been able to mark immediate family members on his tree.

People are also digitising their family history gathered from visits to places like Haridwar where pundits are often asked to draw up genealogical maps. When Pavan Chopra,a 42-year-old marine engineer from Mumbai,visited Haridwar in 2008 to search for his ancestral roots,the pundits there gave him details about his family up to six generations. He put that information on the online family mapping software,MindJet,and sent its links to his relatives living in different places via Facebook,who then helped join the dots and build the tree.

Tapping into this emerging family-tree-building market,Indians too are developing genealogy applications and websites. In 2008,Ravi Oak,an 80-year-old from Pune,developed Elescher-8,a software which integrates and converts into a neat,detailed database information that people have collected over decades about their families by going all the way to Haridwar or putting in other physical effort. Over the last three years,my buyers have increased, says Oak though he doesnt tell us the quantum of the jump.

When someone buys Elescher,he can not only integrate his information but also put it online on kulavruttant.com so that it can be accessed by anyone who is also searching for his/her roots. If you want to know whether you are related to any of the families who have bought Elescher,you can log on to kulavr-uttant.com,punch in your family name,and fill a form that asks you details like your native village,fathers name and so on. Upon verification of the form,your name too figures in the database. The software is available in English,Hindi,Marathi,Telugu,and even Chinese.

Similarly,82-year-old PK Joshi has traced 12-13 generations and 102 Joshi families all across the world over 10 years. Joshi had come out with a 1,500-page epic that is now on its way to become an online edition. I realised that the digital medium is the way ahead now to keep this research up-to-date. So,I am trying to put the entire information online, he says.

The past is a click away.