A number of families were divided in 1947, principally where a marriage crossed communities or where individuals converted or stayed, and those connections have persisted quietly for eighty years.
More common is the connection of memory: a family in Ludhiana that knows its village in Lyallpur district, and a family in Faisalabad that knows its village in Jalandhar district, each holding the other's address and never having used it.
Visa arrangements between the two countries are restrictive, city-specific and slow. Pilgrimage jathas under the 1974 protocol are the main route and their numbers are capped.
A number of reunions have been arranged in recent years, several through the Kartarpur corridor and several through YouTube channels run by individuals who search for villages on request, which is now one of the more effective mechanisms in existence for this and is run by amateurs.
The people who remember the other village are in their eighties and nineties. The window on this closes within a decade and neither state has any programme to record any of it.
Families were divided in 1947 and most have never met since. The relationships are known, the villages are known, and the visa is what is missing.
Social media has reconnected a number of them. Videos of two old men meeting at Kartarpur after seventy years circulate every few months and each of them is a real family.
There is no register, no facilitation and no state interest on either side. What has reconnected these families is individuals with phones.