✦ Jai Vasavi Matha ✦

Dedication

This website is a gift to the Vysya family.

It was built over 3 years by the Grandhi family, and then given away — to every Arya Vysya house that wants somewhere to keep its own record. It is not for sale, it is not owned by a company, and it does not belong to any one person. It belongs to the families in it.

Why no one is named as the founder

A page like this usually carries a photograph and a name. This one does not, and that is deliberate.

Three years of evenings and weekends went into it — reading gazetteers and temple inscriptions, checking village names against the government register, writing to elders about a gothram nobody could agree on, and starting over whenever the record turned out to be wrong. The Grandhi family did that work and paid for it. But the knowledge in it was never theirs. Every house name on the globe came from somewhere. Every correction — a misspelt village, a maiden name written down wrong, a grandfather's year of birth that was off by a decade — came from a family who knew better and took the trouble to say so.

A record of many families cannot have a single author. Put one person's name at the top of it and you have quietly changed what it is.

So the Grandhi family is named here as the household that built it and gave it away, and no individual is named as its founder. Many Vysya families supplied the inputs, the names, the corrections and the arguments that shaped it, and it is theirs just as much.

What the 3 years produced

Not claims — these are counted from the database as this page loads.

The register of people is the part that is only beginning, and it is the part no amount of research can finish. A gazetteer can tell you a village existed in 1911. It cannot tell you who your great-grandmother was. Only your family can, and only if somebody writes it down.

The Grandhi family

Grandhi is an old Arya Vysya house name, carried by families across the Godavari and Krishna deltas, the Srikakulam coast and the Rayalaseema towns. The word behind it is grantha — a book, a written record, a thing bound and kept. It is a fitting name for a family that ended up building a register.

The work behind this site

What the family did here is the ordinary, unglamorous kind of good work: three years of it, unpaid, on something with no business model, for a community rather than a customer. The globe on the front page, the gothra research, the village directory, the temple and satram registers, the family trees and the family web — all of it was built quietly and then handed over without conditions. No advertising has ever been sold on it. No family's records are sold, shared or mined. That was the intention from the first line of code, and it is written into the Terms and the Privacy Policy so that it stays true even when the people change.

The name in the public record

Others carrying the Grandhi name have done things the whole community knows about. They are listed here as documented public figures, with the source beside each one.

A shared surname is not a claim of kinship, and this site never treats it as one. These are people who carry the name and whose lives are a matter of public record — not a lineage, and not relatives of anyone in particular. Where a family can show the line, it belongs in that family's own tree, with its sources, like every other name here.

To the families who gave the inputs

Thank you. Every elder who sat down with a phone and spelt out a village nobody had heard of; every uncle who said “no, that is not our gothram, ours is the other one” and then explained why; every cousin abroad who wrote down four generations from memory at midnight because there was finally somewhere to put them — you are the reason there is anything here at all.

The invitation stands, and it is the whole point of the site: add your family. Correct what is wrong. Add the village, the temple your family endowed, the satram where your grandfather fed pilgrims. If something here is mistaken, say so and it will be fixed — being right matters more on this site than looking finished.

Write to vysyafamily2000@gmail.com, or simply find your house and begin.