Gaddi and biswa: the seat that chooses its heir
When a holding had no son, it adopted one - and the heir took the holding's surname, not the other way round. A little-documented village…
The Mishra name, written down.
What a family knows about itself usually lives in one or two elders. Mishra.info is an attempt to record it - the surname and where it is found, the gotra and pravara system, the Vedic shakhas families follow, the routes out of Kannauj and Mithila, and the sanskaras that still shape a household year.
Most searched: Mishra gotra list · Mishra caste & category
The reference
Ten sections, each written to be useful to someone actually trying to trace their family - not a general encyclopaedia entry.
The Mishra surname
Meaning, etymology, and the regional Brahmin communities in which the surname is found.
Read more →Caste & category
Which community the surname belongs to - Brahmin varna, the regional communities, the General category question, and why a surname is not a caste certificate.
Read more →Gotra & Pravara
What a gotra is, the pravara recitation, the gotras common among Mishra families, and how to find your own.
Read more →Veda & Shakha
Rigveda, Shukla and Krishna Yajurveda, Samaveda - which recension a family follows, and the sutra that goes with it.
Read more →Lineages & migration
Kannauj, Mithila, Awadh, Bhojpur, Odisha and Nepal - how families moved, and what a "mool" is.
Read more →Traditions & Sanskaras
The sixteen sanskaras, upanayana and the sacred thread, kul devta traditions, and the household year.
Read more →Kul Devta & Kul Devi
The family deity: what it is, how each region keeps the practice, and a five-step method to recover yours when the name is lost.
Read more →Notable Mishras
Mandana and Vachaspati Mishra, the Mithila logicians - and the documented modern lines: two Chief Justices from one village, the Banaras gharana, the Mishras of MP politics.
Read more →Genealogy resources
Panda registers at Haridwar and Gaya, land records, temple archives, and templates for recording your own tree.
Read more →Vanshavali charts
Family trees published with each family's consent - click any person to open the next four generations from them.
Open the charts →Claim your identity
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Start with your gotra
Most people can name their gotra and nothing else. It is a good place to start, because it is the one piece of information that reliably survives in a family - recited at every wedding, every sankalpa, every shraddha.
From the gotra you can usually reach the pravara, from the pravara the shakha, and from the shakha the region your family kept its records in. The guide walks through the questions to ask, in the order that works.
Articles
The genealogy your family recites once a year
Every shraddha names ancestors aloud, with gotra, generation by generation. Pitru Paksha is an open family archive - if someone in the room…
What an old wedding invitation can tell you
Gotra, three generations of names, the ancestral village, a date in Samvat - the humble shaadi card is a one-page family record hiding in a…
Corrections are the point
Almost every page here will be wrong somewhere - a date, a village name, a lineage that branched differently than recorded. If your family knows better, that is exactly the material this site is built to keep.