Who are we?” The innocuous question that came from his son caught Ajit Singh off guard. “My own identity was linked with that of my father and grandfather, and it ended at that,” shares Singh. He remembers reaching out to his aunts and uncles to learn more about his family, but none of them, he says, had the answers, he was seeking. “They all belonged to a generation that did not question their elders, or even have open conversations with them. Perhaps, because of this, we may have lost out on many stories.” One of the legends, says Singh, was that their ancestors had fought the First Anglo Sikh War between the Sikh Empire and the British East India Company in 1845-46 in Punjab. “It was just part of family lore, and we didn’t know anything more.”

Adamant about exploring his roots, Singh approached Family Fables Co., a bespoke publishing company that launched in 2017, and which helps families document, preserve, archive and share life stories of the previous generation. It’s during research that the family learnt that they traced their ancestry to the first group of Sikhs, which came into Delhi. “A descendant, Sardar Sahib Sardar Sant Singh, was the Chief Minister of the state of Nabha,” says Samrata Diwan, the founder of Family Fables Co. “We also found his appointment letter and other correspondence written by him at the National Archives of India.”