[BarBoss]

Oh come on! To all those people going on about how hard it is to produce your lineage, have you never heard of the books of taraajim and ansaab? This was an entire genre of books which the Arabs gave special attention to.

The following are a few examples of famous, relied-upon books which recorded the ancestries of the saadah (plural of sayyids) in particular.

-- 'Umdat at-Talib fi Ansab Aal Abi Talib -- Ahmad bin 'Ambah (d. 868 h)
-- Jawahir al-'Iqdayn fi Ansabi Abnaa' as-Sibtayn -- 'Ali as-Samhudi (d. 911 h)
-- Ghayat al-Ikhtisar, fi l-buyutat al-'Alawiyyah, al-mahfudhah min al-ghubar -- Abu Talib Taqi ad-Din an-Naqib
-- Tuhfat az-Zaman fi Tarikhi Saadat al-Yemen (this book specializes on the saadah of Yemen, dispelling your foolish notion of saadah only existing in the sub-continent) -- al-Muhaddith Husayn b. 'Abd ar-Rahman al-Ahdal
-- at-Tuhfat al-'Anbariyyah fi Ansabi Khayr al-Bariyyah -- Abu Fadl Muhammad al-Kadhim
-- 'Uqud al-Almas (bi manaqib al-Habib Ahmad al-'Attas) has a section on ansab
-- Murtada az-Zabidi (major muhaddith, faqih, historian and linguist who wrote the famous sharh on the Ihya) commentated on Mashjar al-Kashaaf.

There are many more, and most of the authors were Arab.

was-salam