When Did Your Family Become Sikhs

[jasdeepsingh2k125]

ok as far as daas knows from his grandparents and father that daas family belongs to basarke which was birthplace of dhan dhan sri guru amardas sahib maharaj ji and dass great great great grandfather was garvai of gurusahib ji...daas has just heard about this....and guru sahib ji gave a pot type something to them and told that they could take out money from it on sangrand without seeing what is inside it...but alas one of daas great grandfather saw inside it and the room in which they saw that is now locked and its entry is banned ....

[chatanga]

Jamabandis are an interesting way of doing ancestry research.

do only jats have jamabandis? or people who have land-holding, all have jamabandis? and where can we see these?

[tuhintuhin]

I was just wondering, do any of you have any idea when your family first became Sikhs?

Mine became Sikhs at the time of the 7th guru. Guru Har Rai Sahib came to my pind. He stopped off with an army before heading off to Kartarpur Sahib.

I don't know how accurate this story is but I was told my some old people, they said that the Guru came to the pind and wanted to stay there. Some villagers refused and turned them away. Then some villagers went after the Guru and asked them to come back. Then the Guru is said "those who came back will stay and the ones who didn't will go away from this pind". Don't know if this story is true, but its the one I was told.

So I was just wondering if anyone else knew how their family became Sikh.

So you are the one from those lucky familes who did benti

[Jangal Da]

do only jats have jamabandis? or people who have land-holding, all have jamabandis? and where can we see these?

Any land holding community or zamindar will have jamabandi records.

If the family was always based in the Indian Punjab, then all you need to do head out for the local tehsil office under which your ancestral land falls. A clerk's official fee for record searches is a tiny nominal amount (I think Rs30 or there about) - but in reality you will want a bit of help that requires the the usual 'top-up' fee and I negotiated this to Rs400. I was also advised to pay another 'fee' for someone who can decipher any archaic handwriting or translate non Gurmukhi scripts as some old ledgers will be written in other scripts (I think this was Rs300). Within 48hrs I had the information that I was hoping to get. My ancestors prior to the Singh names were Hindu.

A friend of mine is a Punjabi Hindu Bahman and he traced his family record back many hundreds of years by contacting the family purohit in Benares who over generations, records names of the deceased whose ashes are brought for immersion in the Ganga.

[Mehtab Singh]

A friend of mine is a Punjabi Hindu Bahman and he traced his family record back many hundreds of years by contacting the family purohit in Benares who over generations, records names of the deceased whose ashes are brought for immersion in the Ganga.

Thats true veer, my dad got the names of our elders dating back 200 years based on those records from Kurukshetra.

[TheFancyBanana]

So you are the one from those lucky familes who did benti

Seems that way. My family were definately blessed, never had any trouble.

I would really like to trace my family back. I'll be checking land records when I go next time.

Is there a way of finding out when a house was built? My old ancesteral home is still there, in the middle of the pind. So it must be really old. It's been there for at least 5-6 generations (as far as my dad can remember).

[proactive]

Any land holding community or zamindar will have jamabandi records.

If the family was always based in the Indian Punjab, then all you need to do head out for the local tehsil office under which your ancestral land falls. A clerk's official fee for record searches is a tiny nominal amount (I think Rs30 or there about) - but in reality you will want a bit of help that requires the the usual 'top-up' fee and I negotiated this to Rs400. I was also advised to pay another 'fee' for someone who can decipher any archaic handwriting or translate non Gurmukhi scripts as some old ledgers will be written in other scripts (I think this was Rs300). Within 48hrs I had the information that I was hoping to get. My ancestors prior to the Singh names were Hindu.

A friend of mine is a Punjabi Hindu Bahman and he traced his family record back many hundreds of years by contacting the family purohit in Benares who over generations, records names of the deceased whose ashes are brought for immersion in the Ganga.

A Jamabandi is pretty easy to read, It is just a list columnwise with the khata and khewat no of the land, name of the owner/s, who is farming the land at the time of the jamabandi, area of the land by kanal and marlas, etc

You can make a start by first knowing if there is a particular bit of land that has always been owned by your family. Then do a search on your village using this website where you can look up the khewat and khata numbers of that bit of land. You can do this by going to your village using the drop down menu and type in your father's name or grandfather's name whoever owns the land now. You will need the owner of that land and whose son he is. i.e Balwant Singh son of Khem Singh etc.

http://plrs.org.in/

Click on FARD

choose your district, tehsil and village

click on jamabandi

click on 'malik de naam matabak' or kewat or khata no.

type in the name of the owner in english and it will be converted to Gurmukhi script.

With this khewat and khata number you can go to the patwari's office called a Patwar Bhawan for your village and then ask the patwari to bring you all the jamabandis for that piece of land to when the records were first kept. It will probably go back to the 1840s. You might need to go to the land records office in the district records office for the older jamabandis

[chatanga]

I would really like to trace my family back. I'll be checking land records when I go next time.

i would like to as well.

[SikhKosh]

Since the early 19th century due to parchar of Akali Baba Phoola Singh Ji (he was one of the Panj administering Amrit to my ancestor). He was the one who did parchaar in Doaba area. Others than Baba Ji not much parchaar has been done before or even after Baba Ji. This also explains why Doaba still has a Hindu majority in districts like Jalandhar, Nawanshahr and Hoshiarpur.

My ancestors were Hindus prior to realizing the Truth and embracing Sikhi.

[Jangal Da]

Most jamabandis will go back to the Britsh settlement period of the mid 19th century. Beyond that is hit and miss and there will often be gaps. Sub tenants will not have records as the main landowner would have everything in their name. The website provided by the Punjab Govt is good, but not up to date despite the date (viz mutations recently registered) at the bottom of the Jamabandi and only leads me back to my great grandfathers on either side. The original Britsh settlement record - probaby dated 1849 for most Doabis, will list several generations back in many cases and thereafter you will get the last one or two generations for continuity confirmation. The older records are written in farsi/ urdu script and despite being able to normally read this, it often appears as an illegible scrawl and so its best to enlist the help of a clerk at the Tehsil.