Viraasat

Why I started

Preserving our families’ stories

Viraasat (विरासत / وراثت) means heritage, legacy, familial traits passed down over generations. For me, it is also a call to preserve the stories that make us a family.

In 2024, I sat down with my grandparents and asked them to tell me about their lives. We talked about their childhoods, their friends and hobbies, what they remembered of their own parents and grandparents, how they met, the work they did, what they had hoped for, and the things that had gone right and wrong along the way. I had known them all my life, but I came away feeling as though I had met another side of them. There was so much in those conversations that no family tree could have shown me.

I also realized how much of our family history lives only in their memories. In my family, as in many South Asian families, stories have been passed down by speaking to one another. We have few written records that reach beyond my grandparents’ generation, and they are among the last people who can tell me about relatives I never met. If I do not make time to listen and record those stories now, parts of that history may disappear with them.

Viraasat grew out of that worry and that sense of discovery: a way to preserve the family stories that written records alone cannot tell. I want my grandparents' and parents' generations to have a place to tell their stories, and mine and the generations after us to keep building on them.

I want families to build this record together: the people who came before us, the places they lived, and the historical context of their lives. Adding someone should be an opportunity to dig through cherished memories and ask a loved one about what we don't know. Future generations can keep contributing to the tree to better understand themselves and preserve it for their own descendants.

Why this matters

A digital heirloom, chronicled by real-life conversations

We have an obligation to preserve these stories while we can still ask the people who remember them. They help us understand who shaped our grandparents and parents, how those lives shaped us, and the historical context our families belong to. Their habits, decisions, and experiences tell us about the people they were, beyond their names and dates.

Written genealogical traditions in South Asia extend back centuries. For example,Hindu pilgrimage registers in India preserve genealogies from long before that period. That collection also documents gaps in whose lives were recorded, including women. The collection describes one community’s record-keeping tradition. For Viraasat, I am starting with the stories my own family holds in living memory.

Adding someone should prompt a conversation

Viraasat is a collaborative genealogy platform intended to become a digital heirloom. Adding someone to the tree should feel like revisiting cherished memories and giving them a lasting home. The existing prompts for everyday life and a single story support that intention. Optional answers let someone begin with what they know.

A gap in knowledge can become a reason to call a loved one: “What do you remember about them?” I hope this gives relatives a reason to talk about their family history and contribute to it together. Beta research will test whether that happens.

Who I am building for

I am starting with three overlapping roles in a family. These generational examples give me a starting point for recruiting participants. Research will help me understand how technical confidence, memory, and willingness to share vary within each family.

• The current custodian. A tech-savvy Gen X relative may be ready to organize the archive but know little beyond a certain branch or generation. They need a manageable starting point and a way to invite relatives who can fill in the gaps.
• The relatives who remember. A WhatsApp-savvy Baby Boomer may remember parents and grandparents whom younger relatives never met. They may welcome a chance to reminisce when someone asks. Familiar language and gentle prompts should make sharing approachable; research will explore when contributing together is easier than alone.
• The next generation of custodians. Millennials and Gen Z may arrive wanting to understand their roots and eventually nurture the record for their own descendants. The experience needs to make room for small contributions now and continuing care over time.

The tradeoff

A richer biography asks more of the contributor. The four-step flow creates space for memories, but it also adds steps compared with the original short form. Optional details and preserved drafts are the current response. The research question is whether that extra space feels inviting or like work, especially when relatives contribute together.

V2 · Focused Family Workspace · October 31, 2026

Giving each page a clearer purpose

After moving Viraasat into separate pages, I could still see how much of the original single-page interface had carried over. Adding someone appeared in several places, account settings sat alongside family records, and reading a story meant looking through controls intended for editing it.

I reviewed the interface against a set of usability tenets, then worked through a clickable prototype before implementing the changes. I wanted each page to have a clearer purpose: explore the tree, spend time with someone’s story, or understand the places connected to their life. Managing access should be easy to find without competing with those activities.

November 1: refining the expanded views

After reviewing screenshots of the release, I found that expanded forms and tree controls still needed work. The next update separated controls from the graph, improved the small-tree fit, and corrected labels and spacing in the place forms. I also restored the indigo identity. The implementation screenshots here show this refinement at commit 7bff313, using fictional local test records.

Keep depth optional

The guided add-person journey remains. After entering a name, Skip optional details offers a shorter route while preserving duplicate checks and recovery if a relationship fails to save. The prototype’s single form did not replace that journey wholesale. Relationship sentences, Generations, and Tree starts with replace technical wording. Birthplace is labeled as birthplace, rather than Home, which could imply current residence.

Protect edits without keeping private drafts indefinitely

Profile drafts survive page navigation. Relevant subject changes and editor-close actions warn before discarding work; failed saves preserve input with local feedback. Drafts stay in memory and clear on sign-out. No new persistent browser storage was introduced for them, deliberately favoring clearing private information over recovery after closing the browser. Some secondary forms still use page-level status feedback.

Move the controls, keep the permission checks

The production workspace retains the real graph, media, timeline, and API-backed forms. This presentation-layer release reuses existing handlers. Changing where an action appears does not change who is allowed to perform it: the server still enforces permissions and redacts medical notes. Database schema, backend authorization, approved-tester admission, session-cookie and CSRF protections, private media tickets, and storage configuration are unchanged.

What the release checks establish

Authenticated local browser checks covered profile saving, retained input after failed saves, cancelling person changes, navigation, media, adding a person, mobile overflow, and sign-out. A separate viewer account could not edit profiles or see medical-note text. These checks confirm the implemented behavior. Understanding how families experience it will require observing their comprehension, satisfaction, and ability to complete tasks.

Render deployed the exact commit. Hosted assets matched the committed files, health returned success, and anonymous circle requests returned 401. Hosted Google owner/viewer sign-in was not repeated during this release’s final verification.

What I want to learn next

I will continue using the 27-tenet audit to review the interface as families use it. This release moved advanced tools into secondary sections while retaining much of their existing behavior, so those interactions still need evaluation. The next round of research will ask:

• Can someone find a relative, read their story, and add another person without instructions?
• Can they distinguish a person in the family archive from an account with access?
• Can they explain who can see medical notes before granting editor access?
• Do optional prompts encourage richer stories without slowing quick additions?
• How does navigation hold up with larger families, keyboard use, and assistive technology?

Context and collaboration

Build the record together

A cousin who remembers a different detail can add it through revisions and discussion, keeping their contribution with the family record. The app also has places and migration, context events, timeline, and audit panels. I am still working on how those pieces should connect: a move to a new city or a world event matters most when it helps someone understand the choices a person made at that point in their life.

User research · Opening beta testing

Learn how families build the record together

I am opening beta testing to learn how these different family roles contribute, individually and together. The working product is a starting point for research; the audience assumptions and intended benefits above still need to be tested.

The proposed first research session follows a small task: add a relative, save one memory, and identify something to ask another family member. I want to observe where people hesitate, what they leave blank, whether the prompts help them remember, and whether they understand who can see and edit their contributions. A follow-up would explore whether they had that conversation and returned to add to the story.

Success would mean families can preserve a meaningful memory without feeling they must complete a biography, and feel comfortable inviting someone else to contribute. I plan to look for these behaviors during research.

What I want to build next

Viraasat is still being built. The current app can hold people, relationships, stories, images, and contributions from invited family members. I want to go further than collecting entries. I am working toward a more natural way to capture oral histories, and a timeline that places someone's life beside the events they lived through. I also want maps to show how a family moved across cities and countries, so later generations can follow those moves and understand how they affected the family.

The current app keeps medical notes hidden from viewers. Longer term, I want to explore an opt-in family health history. Patterns involving conditions such as diabetes or mental and behavioural health can be hard to piece together when the information is scattered or never written down. This connects with my interest in health technology and bringing fragmented medical records into one clearer picture. Exploring this would require consent and careful decisions about how families share sensitive information. The current app provides no diagnostic functionality.

For now, this is a small tester deployment on Render and Supabase free tiers. The hosted service may take a moment to wake up, and Google sign-in is restricted to approved test accounts while I keep building.