Why I built Shijro

My family has always had writers. There are stories of ancestors who wrote books and whole collections of poetry. The one that stayed with me is about my father-in-law’s great-grandfather. He wrote a deewan, a collection of his poems, and with it a shajra: our family tree.

He spent years on it. He collected dates of birth, how many children each person had, and the stories behind the names, and wrote it all down by hand. It was the most complete record of the family anyone had made.

How the original was lost

When he died, many of his descendants wanted the collection. One would take it home, saying it had been their father’s. When that person died, it moved again, and then again. It changed hands so many times that today nobody knows where the original is.

My father-in-law, his grandson, made a photocopy before it left his hands for the last time. That photocopy is the only reason any of it survives.

A handwritten book can only be in one house at a time. When it goes missing, everything in it goes missing too.

The second problem: language

My children understand a little Sindhi when they hear it spoken, but they can’t read it at all. The script is completely foreign to them. Even if we found the original manuscript tomorrow, they couldn’t read it. They also find it hard to talk to their grandparents in their grandparents’ own language, and the stories their grandparents tell are told best in that language.

Many families are in the same position. The people who remember speak one language, the grandchildren read another, and the family’s history sits in between.

What Shijro does about it

I built Shijro so a family’s history belongs to the whole family, and isn’t kept in one house or one person’s memory.

• Nothing has a single copy. A manuscript, a letter or a photo added to Shijro is there for everyone in the family. Nobody can take it home. Anyone in the family can download everything, so it survives even if Shijro doesn’t.
• The tree is shared. Each relative adds what they know, so the family record isn’t one person’s work that ends when they do.
• Voices are kept. Grandparents can tell their stories out loud, or answer a question from a link without installing anything.
• Language stops being a wall. Recordings are written out in the language they were spoken in, Sindhi included, and translated into each reader’s language. The original words are kept beside the translation.

Shijro takes its name from the shajra in that manuscript, the family tree my father-in-law’s great-grandfather spent years writing by hand. I’d heard the word as shijro, and by the time I learned it was shajra, the app already had its name. I’d like the next family tree not to depend on a single copy.