roots

Family Genealogy 1. Yeah, started off with this last September when I went home to Kerala. It was after the realization that me, and many of the relatives to whom I talked to, aren’t aware of the newcomers in the family (thru birth, marriage etc); close relatives and cousins have become distant. Usually genealogical researches are more concerned about ancestors dating back to eons.. Well here my self shouted that I should get my living roots and branches at first!

Started with my own family.. It’s always interesting to go through one’s own roots! Try it yourself!

genealogy brothers

With my parents I went from home to home jotting down basic details (esp names, bdays, weddings, deaths, photos) of relatives. One irking thing I found was none of our living mates don’t even know the name of my grandfather’s sister (dad’s side. she died around 40). One interesting fact I found out was that my grandfather’s grandfather and his brother died on the same day (look at the dates in the picture). It was in a January, bow to them.

If it was in a country like US, genealogical research would have been pretty easy. Everything is recorded and available and people have charts leading to Colombus even . In India, the situation is different. Even getting beyond 50 years or so is pretty difficult. A few I found on the net where those family trees concerned with the East India Company of the yore.

Nevertheless, my family and a few of my cousins (esp. Liya) are with me, constantly providing some information or the other, which keeps encouraging me. What I do with it is compile all these information on a desktop software like Family Tree Maker (there’re dozens of genealogy softwares, free n commercial). Well I did that with what I have. For expanding it, the best way is to put it online, give family members a user-id to append the data or upload photos. This is where TNG (The Next generation Genealogy scripts) helped me out. Well those are the first scripts I ever bought online, only cuz I know they’re the best.. So am on it, slowly updating the Kerala Christian Family Tree

genealogy

In Kerala, elders usually say “vanna vazhi marakkaruthu” (don’t forget your roots). I am young now but somehow it got into my head that one day I will become old, one day I will cease to exist, one day I will fade into oblivion.. After 50 years, what will be? Now a lots of pals know me, my identity is exhaled through this blog, through my email, through my personal presence.. After 50, 100 or 200 years?? May be am forbidden to look that much beyond. But like a curious child I wonder. Will there be any meaning to me then?

May be someone’s good actions can be traced backed to his own wish that others should do good unto him? Well, whatever it is, here I am tracing back to my grand parents, their grand parents and if possible their grand parents. Let them live through me. They had their own identity then. Just a name and photo (if) won’t replace their identity. But still I can give an abode for them to exist in the best possible way, “in the hearts of my family and relatives”.

Through which I may live through as well. Now I’m in the bottom of this chart. Wish some day my grand children and their children add up to this and let me smile somewhere from the middle..

1. Genealogy: The study or investigation of ancestry and family history

25 Responses

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  2. Firstly Congratulations! to Juby & Roxy. I heard quite alot about you but could not personally meet. I am happy to see your blogs and it is very interesting to see your passion towards nature and life.

    Anyways wish you luck with your Visa! May be some time in future we meet.

    Sree/Rama

  3. Jayaraman Puthillam says:

    I am belongs to a famous namboodiri family (Puthillam) in Kerala. I would like to prepare a general programme for namboodiri family tree. Can you help me about this.

  4. sarah says:

    Roxy kutta, I must congratulate you on this awesome work. You must be being blessed by your ansectors for tracing them back to breath life into them through this website and it is a matter of great pride! 🙂

    Coming from a syrian Christian family, I can remember how my interst to trace back my ancestors, starting from the immediate, someday was sparked. I had an elderly gentleman from our church telling that our forefathers were syrian settlers hundreds of years ago. This makes us jewish and hindu tradition following christians!! I had never thought that it could be historically so complicated! 😀 This could lead to so much of history finding too as we move further and further behind in the family tree.

    I wonder how many I could trace back in my family. Living outside kerala and visiting the place for short terms, keeping track of names of a ‘little’ distant relatives can be a JOB! haha. Moreover, like you said, I don’t know how many of my grand aunts/ uncles might be even having track of their elder relatives. This should also inspire us for family gatherings liek the ones you have in your mom’s family. It keeps the family closely knit and the link alive. No matter where in the world you might be, to gather together will show the importance of each individal in that family.

    Tremendous effort dear! Now you have me also to help you in this. 😉

  5. rocksea says:

    😀 Thatz surprising!! I stumbled upon the namboothiri groups while i was searching for some kerala history,,

  6. Sarman ANS says:

    Hi,

    Infact, I got a link to your site from one of Youth Namboothiri Yahoo Group member only. What is surprising me is that you are well informed about these Namboothiri Yahoo groups!

    Cheers
    Sarman

  7. rocksea says:

    Dear Sarman,

    Yes, that is one of the reason i put the reply here itself instead of emailing you. It will help bringing any more people interested or willing to share info. On my mother’s side we have a family history/tree book which I unfortunately didn’t bring over here. May be some info could be gathered from it if they’ve mentioned any conversion in it. Anyways I would be able to add a lot of records from it once i get it.

    About Namboothiri families, there’re a few yahoo groups out there with a lot of members. Have you joined any of them? It must be helpful.
    http://ca.groups.yahoo.com/group/namboothiri/
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/youthnambudiri/

    I’ll also search on conversion histories and notify on any interesting factors. I wish i was in India now as i can do a lot of things from there. Hopefully in an year my PhD will get over and i will be a free (?) bird.

  8. Sarman ANS says:

    Dear Roxy,

    I am too interested in your Family Trees because many Christian families especially in Kottayam area are (or that is what I have understood) descendants of Namboothiry families. So far I haven’t got any direct proof from our side to substantiate those claims. As I said earlier we don’t have any written records. So I am interested to know more about those families who have got converted from Namboothiry families, circumstances of those conversions and their past histories and current whereabouts. Hope our constant and continuous reaction may lead to clues about such families and hence hetherto unknown side of human conversions.

    Hope to keep the interaction alive.

    Sarman

  9. rocksea says:

    Dear Sarman,
    45,000 records!! That too in Kerala. Oh my god! I am stunned but at the same time very happy to see someone who’ve pursued it so far.

    The TNG scripts I’m using is available at a low cost of 29$. It is WORTH more than the price. There’re too many facilities over there which you’ll come to know once you use it. Since your GED file is large, what you can do here is:
    1. FTP the GED file to a folder on your server
    2. From the TNG scripts, update the data from the above GED file.

    Yes, it can handle voluminous data. There’re users with more than 100,000 records. Their service is also great. The s/w is available at http://lythgoes.net/genealogy/software.php You can also look there for other users who’re using TNG. Demo is also available.

    Note: Family Tree Maker has a bit of conflict with TNG as the ID it gives for the first 100 records are like I001 to I099 whereas ideally it should be I1 to I99. Hence I had to shift to PAF and use that GED for the website.

    phpgedview at http://phpgedview.sourceforge.net/ is a free opensource similar to TNG but i wont recommend it. doesn’t come any near to TNG.

    Anyways Sarman, am excited after learning your genealogy research based on Kerala Namboothiri families. I think we should keep in touch and exchange view/info so that we can better our genealogical research.

    Cheers, Roxy

  10. Sarman ANS says:

    Hi,

    I am a Mumbai based Software Professional (42 Years) and I am doing Family Tree Research for last 5 years. I am using Family Tree maker Ver.11.00 and my database has got around 45,000 records and Roots of about 600 Namboothiri families. In some family I could go upto 10-12 generations.

    Namboothiri community in Kerala doesn’t have more than 50000 members. (This is my version and our Community organaisations haven’t accepted this os far.) As it is a small community, all the records in my database are of relatives (distant also) only. As you said in your preface, when I found out the “relative ignorance” of our own cousins prompted my to launch a data collection meeting aged people. In Christian community (I think) you can refer to Church records where as we doesn’t have any such written records. The words and stories narrated by aged members of our community was the only the resource.

    I have tried to download the same to NET but could not succeed because of the size of my database The GED file more than 8MB and the propreitory database of Family Tree maker (where my data is stored) is more than 21MB in size. Freequent upload is impossible to the size factor.

    I found the software used by you is interesting and I was looking for something similar. Can you please help me by providng details about the above software? Can it handle voluminous data? etc etc….

    Regards
    Sarman

  11. rocksea says:

    $susan, 🙂

    $lian, hehe. yeah itz great to go thru those interesting dramas. i have noted down some of them also ;), before everything fades to limbo.

    $neethu & $litty, happy to see you guys here 🙂 hope everything works out well for the benefit of all.

  12. Litty says:

    Roxy, that took real effort.Good work.

    Litty

  13. Neethu says:

    Hey Roskie,

    U r doing a wonderful job man!
    When Anoop forwarded the link I thought I will check out recent changes and its really good!
    Good luck in finding out the tree.We have ours documented with everybodys birthdays phone nunmber , address and modifications happens every year and the same is distributed in our kudumba yogam which happens once every year.

    Regards
    Neethu

  14. Lian says:

    Hi there,
    Great to see so many people interested in genealogy. I too have done some and you get to dig up some interesting stories. Like on my mom’s side, somewhere down the line there was a mother who killed herself because of something the son did. Wow, it’s exciting to find drama in your ancestry. Hehehe. Well, just want to wish you good luck in your efforts.

  15. Suzanne says:

    What an amazingly beautiful and interesting site! I am so happy that you left your link on my page. As for the headache, it is better, thank-you 🙂

  16. rocksea says:

    vadakkusae, did you people try to browse through the church registers; the baptisms and such may be registered at respective churches. We got some details that way.

    Yes there is the ‘family name’ custom as well. Though almost all keralites have family names and use it in the address, only few (may be 1 out of 10 or so) suffix it with names..

    The origin and idea of the family names we keralites use are quite different from others. Our family names usually relate to some speciality of the place or something like that (like yours, vadakkadath, relates to the place and house where your ancestors had lived once). For north indians (Gandhi), most other asian countries (Zhou) and the western countries (Clinton), family names must’ve evolved from the first name of one of the forefathers.

    My family name is Kollamparambil and Edamattom is the place.

  17. vadakkus says:

    You fox..
    whats up??
    well, happy new year, and all that.

    we are trying to do the same thing about our family, and well have reached a dead end in 1921. beyond that, no body knows anything.

    and seeing twilights comment, in our family, the family name ‘vadakkadath’ is added at the end of all members, male or female. even for girls who are marrying into the family, the family name is given as surname, not the husbands name. hence my moms name is meena vadakkadath, and not meena varkey. many christian families in Kerala follow the same thing.

    Roxy, what happened to ‘Edamattathil’? thats your family name right?

    take care and have a nice time.. or should i call u Dr.Roxy?

    vinod

  18. rocksea says:

    $twilight, itz not necessary to suffix my kid’s last name as Roxy. If a name is inappropriate as last name, people take deviations from the rule of thumb.

    $preethi, 12 is a big number. My parents had 5 and 9 siblings. It should be a jovial moment to meet everyone, isn’t it? Conversion how many hundred years before, any idea?

    $jina, me too have pals with same DCruz surnames. Yet it may be easier for anglo indians to check the lineage as there could be official / unofficial records somewhere.

  19. jina says:

    mm..u made me think..and believe me making a family tree is very difficult when u have surnames like mine…hehe…happy newyear buddy ..from erika too…

  20. Preethi says:

    Nice!!

    I wonder how far I would get if I began searching for all the people of my clan. My father is the TWELFTH child in his family… hope you get the picture! 🙂

    Anyways, from what all I have been able to gather… I hear that our clan (Kannath Family) were Naboothiris (I think). And when the conversion happened, the family divided into four (vadakku,thekku,kizhakku,padinjaaru — north/south/east/west). I think I come from the western section…

    Btw, your mom looked gorgeous on her wedding day!

  21. rocksea says:

    twilight, yeah in Kerala almost all Christians have their father’s first name as their last name. Itz also common to put the mother’s name as middle name, esp. for girls. I’m ok with it though once in a while I get irked when someone calls me by last name hehe. I tell it’s my dad’s name not mine. Then for publishing in journals, they initialize the first name, like R. Mathew. So when I provide any article, I give it initialized, M. Roxy, so that they don’t mess with it further 😀

    Some of the hindus in Kerala also follow the same tradition, suffixing dad’s name as last name. Rest of the hindus use caste names (like Nair, Menon etc.). Am not sure about the muslims in Kerala, but for my friends, their names had two parts (eg: Abdul Rasheed) but no suffixes from family.

    Family name system is convenient sometimes but sometimes it can be a mess too. Here in my dept. there are 3 or so ‘Watanabe’s. It can get you confused. Read that in China, govt. asked the people to find new names for their family names, they had several incidents where the wrong persons where arrested :O

  22. twilight says:

    so your son will have a name suffix as Roxy. :)This seems quite different from the north indian’s family names. There, only one name suffix continues for generations. In your case (or it is all over kerala!!!???) it is the first name of the father becomes the surname of the children. is it so?

  23. rocksea says:

    great Ash, ya therez some ‘kudumba koottayma’ on my mum’s side and they used to gather once a year. They had published a book too, with some history (sporadically broken) tracing back to St. Thomas time. I would be able to get a few records and links from that book. Hope some day it will lead to Adam & Eve :O

  24. Ash says:

    hey Roxy …….

    navavalsara aashamsakal…
    my dad too getting to do the same thingy and we meet all the cuzins once in a month …….

    cya and good idea
    Ash

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