ithiasa — so indeed it was
My dad left India for Uganda in the mid-60s. A few years later, my mum followed. They started building a life there. My brother and sister were born there. A kind of life that takes years to assemble, that roots itself in a place.
Then in 1972, Idi Amin expelled the entire South Asian community from Uganda. Ninety days to leave. Everything they had built, left behind. They went back to India, where I was born, and then emigrated again to Kenya, to start over a second time.
This was the story I grew up hearing. Seemed ordinary at the time but was really anything but.
There are people in every family who carry parts of their history in their heads. Uncles who remember the names of villages. Grandparents who know exactly how the family got from one continent to another, and why. Parents who hold the details of a life lived before you existed. Which uncle married when and where and to who.
And these people are getting older or are no longer with us.
The stories don’t disappear all at once. They go quietly. A detail here, a name there, a whole branch of the family tree that no one thought to ask about until it was too late. You can’t Google your grandfather’s picture. You can’t reconstruct the feeling of why a decision was made, only that it was.
I kept thinking: these need to be captured. I suspect there are a lot of people like me, who want the facts, timelines and threads of how one fits into a lineage. Your story, and your family’s.
That feeling is what led me to start building ithiasa.
Itihas (इतिहास) is the Sanskrit and Hindi word for history. The name felt right. It’s the kind of history that doesn’t make the textbooks, but shapes everything about who you are.
The idea is simple: a place to build your family tree, see how everyone connects across generations and continents, and export your family’s story as something you can actually share. Not just a database of names and dates — a story, told the way stories are meant to be told.
It’s still early. I’m building this to find out if it resonates with people who have a story like my family’s, or a quieter one, or one they’re afraid might slip away before it gets told.
If that’s you — this is where it starts. The storytelling is coming. Take a look at what’s there.
The bonds that hold families together across distance and time aren’t automatic. Someone has to tend them. ithiasa is my attempt to make that a little easier.