Sources & Method

This page explains how this archive decides what to publish, and — as importantly — what it declines to publish and why.

Evidence tiers

Every substantive claim on this site is tagged with one of five tiers. The tier controls how, or whether, the claim may be stated publicly.

Tier	Meaning	Publication rule
A	Strongly documented	In the scholarly reference works and corroborated elsewhere. Publish as fact.
B	Well supported	In one reference work, or multiple independent press accounts, uncontested. Publish plainly.
C	Partially supported / requires further confirmation	Press-only, single-source, or contested between sources. Publish only with attribution.
D	Family testimony / oral or privately transmitted account	Family oral history, undocumented. Not published as fact; only as labelled family tradition.
X	Not established / conflicting / unsuitable for publication as settled fact	Asserted somewhere but contradicted by better sources, or otherwise unresolved. Do not publish as settled fact.

Source hierarchy

Scholarly reference works and primary statutory or archival material outrank press coverage. Press coverage outranks undated genealogy sites and unsourced web listings. Family testimony is valuable and is published — but visibly labelled, and never silently merged into the documented record.

Source	Type	Status	Note
Encyclopaedia of Sikhism Harbans Singh (ed.)	scholarly reference work	In use	Primary scholarly reference work used throughout the dossier.
Biography of Teja Singh Samundri (Punjabi, 1975) Dr Piar Singh	scholarly reference work	In use	Definitive Punjabi-language scholarly biography. An English translation is in acquisition and not yet incorporated — claims here are pre-translation.
The Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925 (Punjab Act VIII of 1925)	primary statute	In use	Official reproduction, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India; corroborated by PRS India legislative archive and the Haryana state Acts series.
SikhiWiki	press modern	In use	Community reference wiki. Treated as secondary/uncorroborated unless matched by a reference work.
Tribune India — centenary essay Taranjit Singh Sandhu	family testimony	In use	Family-connected perspective. Valuable but labelled — not treated as neutral historical record, per project principle.
jatchiefs.com genealogy listing	genealogy site unreliable	DO NOT USE	Gives birth year 1881, contradicted by every reference work. Not used for any claim.
2026 centenary press coverage (various outlets)	press modern	In use	Contains at least one documented arithmetic error (flagged in the Master Research Dossier). Used only where corroborated.

What this archive does not publish, and why

Three specific overstatements appear in circulating secondary material about Teja Singh Samundri. This archive does not use them:

"Founder of the SGPC." He was one of the founding members. The SGPC was not founded by one person, and the stronger claim is not supported by the reference literature.
"The architect of the Gurdwara Reform Movement." He was one of its principal architects. The movement had many organisers across many gurdwaras and morchas; singular framing overstates one person's role in a collective institutional transformation.
"Killed by the British." He died in British custody; the reported cause was a heart attack, and some accounts subsequently questioned the circumstances. That is a materially different and more precise claim than an assertion of killing, which the evidence does not currently support.

A fourth claim — that he was involved in founding the Hindustan Times — is withheld entirely pending further evidence. It surfaced in 2026 centenary press coverage and could not be corroborated in any reference work; it is treated as a probable fabrication until shown otherwise.

Image provenance policy

No image is published on this site without a recorded object ID, source, rights status, caption, provenance state, and alt text. Where rights status is UNKNOWN — as with the one candidate portrait currently under review — no image is shown. A missing image is preferred to an unattributed one.

Correction policy

Every tier change is logged before it is published, with the old status, the new evidence, the source, the reasoning, and the new tier. Nothing changes on the page before it changes in that log. See Open Research Questions for what remains unresolved.