Build and explore your family tree

myVamsam is an online family tree and genealogy platform for creating, exploring, preserving and sharing family histories. You can map your own family, work on a tree together with relatives, publish a tree for anyone to explore — and open trees of historical and traditional lineages that other people have built and curated.

What is myVamsam?

At its simplest, myVamsam is a family tree maker that runs in your browser. You add people, connect them as parents, children, spouses and siblings, and the tree draws itself: generations stacked from oldest to youngest, marriages joined by a line, children hanging from their parents.

What makes it different is what the tree is for. A family tree here is not just a diagram you print once. It is a living record you can search, navigate, annotate with sources and stories, share with others, and connect to a growing encyclopedia of people and traditions.

The name comes from vamsha (vamsam in several Indian languages), the Sanskrit word for lineage and dynasty — and lineage, in all its forms, is what the platform is built around.

What you can do with myVamsam

Build a family tree

Add a person and describe them the way genealogy actually needs: name and aliases, gender, birth and death, places, occupation, photo, notes, life events and citations. Then connect them.

The relationships are richer than a simple parent-and-child chart:

Several marriages. A person can have more than one spouse, in order, with each marriage marked as married or divorced, and with its dates.
Adoption and custody. Record who a child's biological parents are, who raised them, and who has custody.
Half-siblings, twins and unknown parents. Trees are messy in real life. The chart shows people whose parents are not recorded rather than hiding them.
Clans. Group people into families, each with its own colour, so a large tree stays readable.
Any calendar. Dates can be kept in alternative era systems (for example Kali Yuga or Vikram Samvat), or as free text such as a named age, where no calendar year exists.

Explore relationships

The tree is interactive: pan, zoom, click a person and their profile opens beside the chart.

Find relation answers the question "how are these two people related?" by tracing a path between them.
Global view shows how the clans in a tree connect to one another.
Ancestors and descendants can be followed through as many generations as the tree holds.
Statistics and duplicate detection help you understand a large tree and clean it up — the duplicate finder spots people who were probably entered twice so you can merge them.

Work with other people

Invite collaborators to edit a tree with you.
Send an invitation to claim a profile, so a relative can take ownership of their own entry.
On public trees, signed-in visitors can post corrections, sources and questions in a discussion, and the owner can mark them resolved.
Connect with other members and message them, subject to age and block controls.

Every tree, called a project, is private until you decide otherwise. A public project becomes a read-only page anyone can explore, with a page for each person, a share link and a QR code. Visitors can also copy a public tree into their own account and continue from it.

Personal details such as phone numbers, private email addresses and photo-library links you store on a person are never shown on public pages.

Keep your data yours

Import GEDCOM files from other genealogy programs, or myVamsam's own JSON.
Export the whole tree, or a single clan, as JSON, and save the chart as an image.
Delete your account from inside the app whenever you like.

More than a family tree

A family tree is not always a literal biological genealogy — and myVamsam is built to hold the other kinds too.

The same model that records your grandparents can record a royal dynasty, a traditional lineage recorded in a text, a mythological genealogy, or a fictional family. Where a tradition tells of a being who is an incarnation of another, that is kept as a separate, narrative relationship: it enriches the story without ever changing the family arithmetic of who is whose parent.

This is why a project can hold well over a hundred characters from an epic, grouped into the lineages the text describes, with each person's tradition and sources attached.

Explore what is already here

You do not need to start from scratch. What began as two epics has grown into a fast-expanding library of mythological, historical and traditional lineages, all open to explore right now:

The Ramayana — the Raghu and Videha houses, the lineages of Lanka and Kishkindha, and the celestial families around them.
The Mahabharata — the Kuru, Yadu and Panchala lineages and the many families woven through the epic.
Mythology: Puranic Mythology, Genesis, Hebrew Bible: Exodus to Eli & Samuel, House of David, Greek Mythology, Greek Heroes, Norse Mythology, Volsunga Saga, Persian Mythology, Egyptian Pantheon, and Mesopotamian Mythology.
Historical dynasties: Egyptian Kings, Maurya Empire, Gupta Empire, The Tamil Sangam, The Chola-Pandya Imperial Age, and The Kulasekhara Dynasty.
Traditional lineages: Buddhist.
Explore all public trees — browse the full, growing catalogue by category: mythology, historical and traditional.

More traditions and dynasties are added regularly — Explore is sorted so the newest additions are always easy to find.

A wiki beside the trees

Alongside the trees there is a growing wiki of more than three hundred articles about individual people, families and stories. Each article explains who someone is, how they are related, and where the account comes from.

Articles are written independently for myVamsam from the sources they list. Where traditions differ, an article names the tradition it follows and notes the variants, rather than presenting one telling as the only one. A discussion section lets readers suggest corrections or cite better sources.

People who appear more than once

Some figures appear in several trees — the same god, king or sage in more than one epic. myVamsam handles this in two ways:

Publicly, a person in a tree can be attached to a wiki article, and every appearance of that figure shares the same article. Whichever tree you arrive from, you read the same explanation.
Privately, project owners can connect related people across their own projects — for example as the same person, or through another defined relationship such as parent, spouse or incarnation — and jump between them with one click. These links are for you; they do not change any tree and are not shown on public pages.

Frequently asked questions

What is a family tree?

A family tree is a diagram of a family's relationships: who the parents and children are, who married whom, and how the generations connect. It is the most familiar way to show a person's ancestors and descendants at a glance.

What is genealogy, and how is it different from a family tree?

Genealogy is the study and documentation of family history — finding the records, sources and stories behind the names. A family tree is one way of presenting what genealogy discovers. myVamsam supports both: the visual tree, and the sources, notes and articles that stand behind it.

How do I create a family tree on myVamsam?

Sign in, start a project, and add yourself. Then add your parents, siblings, spouse and children, and keep going outwards. You can also import an existing tree from a GEDCOM file exported by another genealogy program.

Can I keep my family tree private?

Yes. Projects are private by default and only you — and any collaborators you invite — can open them. Nothing becomes public unless you change a project's visibility.

Is my family tree public?

Not unless you choose to make it so. A new project starts private; you decide, project by project, whether to publish it as a read-only page.

Can I import an existing family tree from a GEDCOM file?

Yes. GEDCOM is the standard export format used by most genealogy programs. Import one to bring an existing tree into myVamsam and continue working on it here.

What kinds of relationships can I add?

More than a simple parent-and-child line: several marriages in order, divorce, adoption alongside biological parentage, custody, half-siblings, twins, and people whose gender or parents are not known. Traditional relationships such as one being's incarnation of another are recorded separately from biology, so they never change who a person's parents are.

Yes. Make a project public and share its link or QR code. Visitors can explore it read-only, browse a page for each person, and leave corrections or questions in its discussion.

Can I build a historical, traditional or fictional family tree?

Yes. Nothing restricts a tree to living relatives. Dynasties, lineages from historical texts, mythological genealogies and fictional families all work, and you can record the tradition and sources behind each person.

Can I work on a tree with relatives?

Yes. Invite collaborators to edit a project with you, or send a relative an invitation to claim their own profile.

Who can use myVamsam?

Accounts are for adults aged 18 and over. Signing in uses your Google account.

How do I get my data out?

Export any project, or just one clan, as a file at any time, and save the chart as an image. You can also delete your account from within the app.

Start exploring

Questions or corrections? Write to hello@myvamsam.com.