NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 4 What Are the Sources of History? — LET'S EXPLORE
Book page 66 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
Can you collect information about at least three generations of your family on your mother's and father's sides? Create a family tree with your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Find out their names, what they did for a living and where they were born. Also, write the sources from where you got this information.
Answer
This is a research project, not a question with one right answer. The table you fill in has five columns — Relation, Name, Occupation, Place of birth, Source of information — and the last column is the one that makes it history rather than family gossip.
Step 1 — draw the family tree. Put yourself at the bottom and work upwards, keeping the two sides separate:
A three-generation family tree. Each box becomes one row of the book's table on page 66.
Step 2 — hunt for the information, and note where each fact came from. These are your sources of history:
Names, occupations, village names, stories about why the family moved
Rich but not exact. Dates drift; two relatives may remember differently.
Documents — Aadhaar cards, ration cards, school leaving certificates, birth and marriage certificates, land papers, pension books
Exact names, dates and places
Very reliable, and easy to quote in your table.
Photographs — with dates or occasions written behind them
Faces, clothes, houses, who was present
Reliable for people and places; the date is often missing.
Letters, diaries, old account books, invitation cards
Dates of weddings, births, journeys, prices, handwriting
Very good, especially for dating an event.
Objects — utensils, jewellery, tools of the family trade, old coins
What the family did for a living, how well-off it was
Suggestive rather than exact — best used with an elder's explanation.
Village or community records — panchayat registers, temple or gurudwara records, family genealogies kept by hereditary bards
Names going back several generations
Can reach much further back than living memory.
Sample row:Relation — Grandparents (paternal). Name — Shri Ram Prasad Verma and Smt. Kamla Devi. Occupation — He was a school teacher; she farmed the family's two bighas. Place of birth — Bakhtiyarpur, Bihar. Source of information — my father's account, my grandfather's school service book, and a 1968 photograph with the date written on the back.
Why the last column matters most: without it, a family tree is only a claim. With it, anyone can check your work — which is precisely the difference between a story and history. Notice too what happens as you go back: for your parents you have documents, for your great-grandparents perhaps only a name and a village. The further back you go, the fewer the sources — exactly the problem historians face with ancient India.