Public Family Trees/Mahatma Gandhi/Lakshmi Gandhi
3
Generation
0
Ancestors
4
Descendants
4
Children
1
Marriages
Lakshmi Gandhi was the wife of Devdas Gandhi, the youngest son of Mahatma Gandhi, and the daughter of the Indian statesman and independence leader C. Rajagopalachari, who later became independent India's first Indian-born Governor-General. Her 1933 marriage to Devdas, arranged across a caste boundary, was notable at the time and was supported by both families' patriarchs as an expression of their shared opposition to…
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Mahatma Gandhi family.
Next Generation
4 children recorded in this branch.
Your turn
Free, with no sign-up to start. Add yourself, then your parents and grandparents, and watch the tree grow.
Gen 2 · 1869 - 1948
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869-1948) was an Indian lawyer and political leader who led India's independence movement from British rule through nonviolent civil disobedience, a philosophy known as satyagraha. Born in Porbandar, Gujarat, to Karamchand and Putlibai Gandhi, he trained as a barrister in London, developed his methods of nonviolent resistance while working in South Africa, and returned to India in 1915 to lead campaigns such as the Salt March. He married Kasturba Gandhi in 1883 and the couple had four sons, Harilal, Manilal, Ramdas and Devdas, whose descendants carried forward his legacy in India and South Africa. Revered as the Father of the Nation in India, he is honored worldwide as Mahatma, meaning 'great soul'.
Gen 3 · 1888 - 1948
Harilal Gandhi (1888-1948) was the eldest son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. His relationship with his father was troubled and often publicly strained: Gandhi discouraged him from pursuing a formal legal education in England, a decision Harilal resented for the rest of his life. Harilal struggled with business failures, alcoholism, and a public conversion to Islam and later return to Hinduism, all covered extensively in the Indian press of the time. He married Gulab (Chanchal) Gandhi, with whom he had several children, including a son, Kantilal Gandhi. Estranged from his father for much of his adult life, Harilal died in Mumbai in 1948, shortly after Gandhi's own death.
Gen 3 · 1892 - 1956
Manilal Gandhi (1892-1956) was the second son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. He spent most of his adult life in South Africa, where he took over editorship of Indian Opinion, the newspaper his father had founded in 1903 to serve the Indian community, and continued it for decades from the Phoenix Settlement near Durban. He was active in the Natal Indian Congress and took part in passive-resistance campaigns against discriminatory legislation in South Africa, for which he was imprisoned several times. He married Sushila Gandhi, and their children, including Arun Gandhi and Ela Gandhi, continued the family's activist tradition in both India and South Africa. Manilal died in 1956.
Gen 3 · 1897 - 1969
Ramdas Gandhi (1897-1969) was the third son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. He worked in business in central India, including a period managing a printing press and other enterprises in Nagpur, while remaining closely involved in his father's constructive-work and khadi (hand-spun cloth) programs. He accompanied Gandhi during parts of the independence movement and was present at various points in his father's later life. He married Nirmala Gandhi, and their daughter, Sumitra Kulkarni, went on to be associated with the preservation of Sabarmati Ashram, the Ahmedabad institution central to Gandhi's constructive-work philosophy. Ramdas died in 1969.
Gen 4 · b. 1940
Ela Gandhi (born 1940) is a South African social worker and politician, a granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi through his son Manilal Gandhi and daughter-in-law Sushila Gandhi. Raised at the Phoenix Settlement near Durban that her grandfather had founded, she was active in the anti-apartheid movement and was later placed under a banning order by the South African government for her activism. Following the end of apartheid, she served as a Member of Parliament for the African National Congress from 1994 to 2004 and has continued work promoting nonviolence and restorative justice through the Gandhi Development Trust. She is the sister of peace activist Arun Gandhi.
Gen 5 · b. 1960
Tushar Gandhi (born 1960) is an Indian author and social activist, a great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi through the line of his eldest son, Harilal Gandhi, and Harilal's son, Kantilal Gandhi. He is best known for his book 'Let's Kill Gandhi', a detailed account of the events and conspiracy surrounding his great-grandfather's death, and he has served as president of the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting Gandhian values. He has been an outspoken public commentator on nonviolence, communal harmony and the political uses and misuses of his great-grandfather's legacy in contemporary India.
Gen 1
Karamchand Gandhi, known as Kaba Gandhi, was the father of Mahatma Gandhi and served as diwan (chief minister) to the princely state of Porbandar and later to Rajkot and Vankaner in the Kathiawar region of present-day Gujarat. A respected local administrator, he came from a family with a long tradition of holding ministerial posts in the small Kathiawari states. He married several times; his last wife, Putlibai, was Mohandas Gandhi's mother. Karamchand died in 1885, when Mohandas was a teenager, an event Gandhi later wrote about in his autobiography as a formative and painful memory of his youth.
Gen 1
Putlibai Gandhi was the mother of Mahatma Gandhi and the fourth wife of Karamchand Gandhi, diwan of Porbandar. A devout Hindu of the Pranami Vaishnava tradition, she was known for her deep religiosity, frequent fasting, and strict personal discipline, qualities that Gandhi later credited as a profound early influence on his own commitment to truth, self-restraint, and nonviolence. She raised Mohandas in Porbandar and Rajkot alongside his siblings. Putlibai died in 1891 while Gandhi was studying law in London, and he learned of her death only after returning to India, a loss he described as one of the deepest sorrows of his early life.
Gen 4 · b. 1934
Arun Gandhi (born 1934) is a peace activist and writer, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi through his father, Manilal Gandhi, and mother, Sushila Gandhi. Raised partly in South Africa during the era of racial discrimination that preceded and continued into apartheid, he later moved to India and worked as a journalist before relocating to the United States. In 1991 he co-founded the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, through which he has written and lectured internationally on nonviolent conflict resolution, drawing on his childhood memories of his grandfather, which he recounted in books including 'The Gift of Anger' and other memoirs. He is the brother of South African politician Ela Gandhi.
Gen 2 · 1869 - 1944
Kasturba Gandhi (1869-1944), also known as Kasturba Makhanji Kapadia before marriage, was the wife of Mahatma Gandhi and an activist in her own right. Married to Mohandas in 1883 in an arranged child marriage customary at the time, she joined him in South Africa and later in India, participating in satyagraha campaigns, being jailed multiple times for civil disobedience, and organizing relief and education work among India's poor. The couple had four sons: Harilal, Manilal, Ramdas and Devdas. She died in 1944 while imprisoned with her husband at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, during the Quit India movement. She is remembered as 'Ba', a term of affection and respect across India.
Gen 4
Kantilal Gandhi was a son of Harilal Gandhi and Gulab (Chanchal) Gandhi, making him a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi through the Harilal branch of the family. Comparatively little is documented about his own life and career, but he is recorded within the family's history as the father of Tushar Gandhi, the author and activist who has written extensively about his great-grandfather's life and, in particular, about the events surrounding Gandhi's death.
The House of Glücksburg is the reigning royal house of Denmark and Norway and the former royal house of Greece, a branch of the ancient House of Oldenburg whose modern members all descend from King Christian IX of Denmark (1818 to 1906) and his wife Louise of Hesse-Kassel. Through the marriages of their six children, a minor ducal family from the Danish-German borderland became the common ancestor of monarchs in Copenhagen, Oslo and Athens, of a British queen consort, of a Russian empress, and of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. ## Origins The house takes its name from Glücksburg, a small castle town in Schleswig, and belongs to the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg line of the House of Oldenburg, which had held the Danish throne since 1448. Christian IX was a prince of that cadet branch with no expectation of ruling until the childless Frederik VII made the Danish succession an open European question. Christian succeeded him in 1863, and within months his second son was elected King of the Hellenes as George I, planting the family in Greece for 110 years. In 1905 his grandson Prince Carl of Denmark accepted the Norwegian throne as Haakon VII, giving Norway its own dynasty after centuries of union with Denmark and then Sweden. ## Notable members Christian IX was nicknamed the father-in-law of Europe: his daughter Alexandra married Edward VII of the United Kingdom, and his daughter Dagmar became Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia, mother of Nicholas II. The Danish line runs through Christian X, Frederik IX and Queen Margrethe II, a trained archaeologist and illustrator who reigned from 1972 until her abdication in 2024, to her son King Frederik X and Queen Mary. The Norwegian line runs from Haakon VII and Queen Maud through Olav V, an Olympic sailing champion, to King Harald V and Crown Prince Haakon. The Greek line produced Constantine I, Paul, Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie, Queen SofÃa of Spain, and Prince Andrew's son Philip, consort to Elizabeth II for 73 years. ## Significance No other western dynasty connects as many surviving monarchies in a single documented lineage. Two of Europe's ten reigning royal families, Denmark and Norway, are Glücksburg in the male line, and the house also sits in the ancestry of the British and Spanish royal families. Its history traces the transformation of European monarchy itself: from the dynastic matchmaking of the 1860s, through the loss of the Russian and Greek thrones, to the constitutional, publicly accountable monarchies of modern Scandinavia. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | House name | Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, a branch of the House of Oldenburg | | Founding figure of the modern house | Christian IX of Denmark (1818 to 1906) | | Ancestral seat | Glücksburg Castle, Schleswig | | Thrones held | Denmark (1863 to present), Greece (1863 to 1973), Norway (1905 to present) | | Current heads of state | Frederik X of Denmark, Harald V of Norway | | Best-known member abroad | Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921 to 2021) | | Nickname of its founder | The father-in-law of Europe |
The Vanderbilts are an American family who rose from Dutch farming stock on Staten Island to hold the largest private fortune in the United States, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as the Commodore, out of nineteenth century shipping and railroads, and known today for the Gilded Age houses their descendants built and for figures from Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, to the journalist Anderson Cooper. ## Origins on Staten Island The family descends from Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, a Dutch settler who reached New Netherland in the seventeenth century and whose descendants farmed on Staten Island for generations. Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) was born there, the son of a boatman, and began work as a teenager carrying freight across New York Harbour in a single sailing barge. He married his first cousin Sophia Johnson in 1813. ## The railroad fortune Vanderbilt moved from sail to steam, dominated the Hudson River and coastal trade, and after the Civil War turned to railroads, consolidating the New York Central system and building Grand Central Depot. He left almost the whole fortune to one son, William Henry Vanderbilt, who nearly doubled it in eight years before dividing it evenly among his own eight children. They built the family's great houses: The Breakers and Marble House at Newport, Biltmore House in North Carolina, Hyde Park on the Hudson, Florham in New Jersey and Shelburne Farms in Vermont. ## Notable members The third and fourth generations produced Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the 9th Duke of Marlborough and became a social reformer in England; the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who died in the sinking of the Lusitania; and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, who won the America's Cup three times and invented contract bridge. The modern line runs through Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt to the designer Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. ## Significance No American family is more closely identified with the Gilded Age. The Vanderbilts set the pattern for how new industrial wealth was spent, and then for how quickly such a fortune disperses across many heirs. What endures is institutional: Vanderbilt University, the Whitney Museum, and the houses at Newport, Hyde Park, Shelburne and Asheville that are now museums and public estates. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder | Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), the Commodore | | Origin | Staten Island, New York, of Dutch descent | | Source of wealth | Steamboat shipping, then the New York Central railroads | | Famous houses | The Breakers, Marble House, Biltmore House, Hyde Park | | Best known members | Consuelo Vanderbilt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Gloria Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper | | Generations covered | Five, from the Commodore to Anderson Cooper |
The Belgian royal family, formally the House of Belgium and dynastically a branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, is the reigning family of Belgium, founded when the German prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld accepted the throne of the newly independent kingdom in 1831 and continuing today through King Philippe and his heir, Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant. Belgium became independent from the Netherlands in 1830 and chose a constitutional monarchy. Its National Congress looked abroad for a sovereign who could balance French and British interests, and settled on Leopold, a widowed, well-connected and famously cautious prince who had already turned down the crown of Greece. He took the constitutional oath on 21 July 1831, still the Belgian national day. Seven monarchs have reigned since: Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, Baudouin, Albert II and Philippe. ## Origins The dynasty's roots are in the small Thuringian duchy of Saxe-Coburg, whose princes married into half the thrones of nineteenth-century Europe. Leopold I was the uncle of both Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, and his second marriage, to Louise-Marie of Orleans, daughter of the French king Louis Philippe I, tied the new kingdom to Paris as well as London. The crown did not pass in a straight line: Leopold II's only son died at the age of nine, so the succession moved to Leopold II's brother Philippe, Count of Flanders, and then to Philippe's son, Albert I. Every Belgian monarch since 1909 descends from that collateral branch. ## Notable members Leopold II is the most studied and most criticised figure in the family, remembered for the industrial boom and monumental building of his reign and, above all, for his personal rule over the Congo Free State. Albert I and Queen Elisabeth of Bavaria became wartime symbols of Belgian resistance behind the Yser in 1914. Leopold III's surrender in 1940 and his conduct under occupation triggered the political crisis known as the Royal Question and ended in his abdication. Baudouin reigned for 42 years and presided over Congolese independence and Belgium's transformation into a federal state. Daughters of the house carried its blood outward: Charlotte became Empress Carlota of Mexico, Marie-Jose was the last Queen of Italy, and Josephine-Charlotte was Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. ## Significance In a country divided by language, the monarchy has been the one institution claimed by both Flemish and Walloon Belgians, and the king's role in brokering coalition governments remains politically real rather than ceremonial. The family has also changed with the country: equal succession was introduced in 1991, making Princess Elisabeth the first female Duchess of Brabant and the future first queen regnant of the Belgians, and in 2020 a court recognised Delphine of Saxe-Coburg as a daughter of Albert II. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Dynasty | House of Belgium (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) | | Country | Kingdom of Belgium | | Founder | Leopold I, King of the Belgians (1790-1865) | | Reigning since | 21 July 1831 | | Monarchs to date | Seven, from Leopold I to Philippe | | Current head | King Philippe (born 1960), reigning since 2013 | | Heir apparent | Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant (born 2001) | | Principal residences | Royal Palace of Brussels, Castle of Laeken | | Motto | L'union fait la force / Eendracht maakt macht |
Lakshmi Gandhi has 4 recorded children: Rajmohan Gandhi, Ramchandra Gandhi, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee.
Lakshmi Gandhi married Devdas Gandhi.
Lakshmi Gandhi's recorded native place is India.
0 ancestors and 4 descendants of Lakshmi Gandhi are recorded so far, within a tree of 21 people.
Lakshmi Gandhi is recorded in the Mahatma Gandhi family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 20 other people.
Trace Lakshmi Gandhi's connections across the Mahatma Gandhitree, or begin preserving your own family's history today.
Free. Private by default. GEDCOM export any time.