Two separate systems recorded Punjabi family genealogies. The Bhatt Vahis were kept by the Bhatt families who contributed to the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, written in a private script, recording births, marriages, deaths and events for the families they served.
The pandas of Haridwar, and of Pehowa and Kurukshetra, kept registers organised by district and by got, in which a family visiting to immerse ashes would record the death, the survivors and their relationships, and sign. Those registers go back several centuries in some cases and are still maintained.
A Punjabi family that knows which panda's register it is in can often trace itself back six or eight generations. Most families do not know.
The mirasis served the same function orally for Muslim and many Hindu and Sikh families, keeping and reciting lineages at weddings. That transmission ended in Indian Punjab in 1947.
Between the vahis, the pandas' registers and the settlement records, more genealogical material exists for rural Punjab than for most of the world, and it is almost entirely unindexed.
The script is the barrier. They are written in a mercantile hand of the Landa or Mahajani family, without vowels and heavily abbreviated, readable only by somebody trained in the house that kept them. A ledger nobody outside the family can read is safe, and it is also very nearly lost.
The entries are formulaic, which is what makes them usable. Name, father, got, village, the date by the desi calendar, the event and who was present. A run of those across three centuries is a demographic record of a kind that does not otherwise exist for rural South Asia at all.
They are the only continuous family records that exist for ordinary Punjabis over centuries, and they are in private hands, uncatalogued, and are being lost as the profession ends.