Lineage

Reading a shajrah nasab document

Traditional lineage documents follow conventions that are easy to misread. How the chain is written, what the seals mean, and how to transcribe one without losing information.

A shajrah nasabشجرة النسب — literally “tree of lineage” — is a written genealogical document, often held by one branch of a family and produced at moments when descent needed to be shown. If one exists in your family it is likely the single most important source you will handle, and it is also the one most commonly mistranscribed.

The conventions below are broadly shared, though regional and period variation is substantial. Read the document on its own terms before assuming any of it.

The chain is the document

The core is a patronymic chain running from a named individual back toward an ancestor, with each generation linked by bin or ibn (son of), or bint (daughter of):

فلان بن فلان بن فلان

Read right to left, each name is the father of the one before it. The chain almost always runs upward — from the recent person toward the distant ancestor — which is the reverse of how most modern family trees are drawn, and reversing it by accident is the most common transcription error there is.

What else is on the page

Seals and attestations

Many documents carry seals or signed statements from a scholar, a registrar, a qadi, or a naqibنقيب attesting that the holder’s descent is as stated. These are the load-bearing part of the document from an evidentiary standpoint: they tell you that someone with standing examined the claim, and roughly when.

Record each seal separately — its text, its position, and the date if given. A document with three attestations added across two centuries is far stronger than one bearing a single undated stamp, and that distinction disappears entirely if you transcribe only the names.

Marginal additions

Margins accumulate later generations, corrections, and notes in different hands. These are not clutter — they are the document’s revision history, and often the only evidence of when it was updated and by whom. Photograph margins fully; do not crop to the main text.

Dating

Dates are usually Hijri. Note the calendar explicitly and preserve the original form alongside any conversion. Some documents give no date at all, in which case the hands, the seals and the paper are your only chronological evidence — all the more reason to photograph rather than merely transcribe.

Reading it critically

A shajrah nasab is a strong source. It is not automatically decisive, and treating it as beyond question does the document a disservice — the tradition that produced these papers also produced the offices that scrutinised them.

• When was it written? A document composed in 1900 about a fourteenth-century ancestor is a report, not a contemporaneous record. It may rest on excellent earlier material — but the question of what it was based on is a real one.
• Is the hand consistent? A uniform hand across a chain claimed to have grown over generations means the whole thing was copied at one sitting. That is ordinary and often innocent, but it makes the document a copy rather than an original, and the original’s whereabouts becomes the interesting question.
• Does the ink or hand change mid-chain? Sometimes evidence of legitimate later addition. Sometimes evidence of insertion. Note it either way; do not resolve it silently.
• Does it agree with independent records? Land records, graves and biographical dictionaries provide external checks on at least the recent portion.

Transcribing it properly

1. Photograph before anything else. Whole page, then overlapping detail shots, then margins and seals individually. Flat, even light, no flash on glossy surfaces.
2. Transcribe in the original script first, exactly as written, including honorifics and anything you cannot read (mark illegible passages rather than guessing).
3. Transliterate second, as a separate layer. Never discard the original — transliteration loses distinctions that matter for matching names against other records.
4. Number the generations from the document’s starting person, so you can refer to a specific link unambiguously when discussing it later.
5. Note what is not there. Missing dates, absent seals, damaged sections. Silence in a source is information.

Entering it into a tree

On Shajrah, the document itself is uploaded as evidence and attached to the people it supports — ideally to each person in the chain, not only the first. A single document can evidence a dozen links, and attaching it once at the top leaves the rest of the chain looking unsupported.

Where the document and living memory disagree, record both rather than choosing. The disagreement is itself a finding, and the dispute mechanism exists so that it can be discussed in the open rather than settled by whoever typed first. See what counts as evidence in nasab for how the two are weighed.