We are very excited to announce that our website now has searchable databases for family history research. These will be invaluable for researching family history. We have translated sections of Greek documents into English to create our new searchable database.
Each database will be in English and fully searchable, making finding information about our ancestors easy and straight-forward with no translating to be done. Each database can be searched by several fields, allowing you to search by surname, given name, father’s name or all of them.
As you can see from the image below, the table is entirely in English. Each column can be filtered to narrow down your searches making finding information easy.
Our first searchable database is Greek newspapers that have been transcribed as printed, but from our research it is clear that there are quite a few printing errors such as incorrect names of one of the people getting engaged or wrong initial of father of the groom, so keep this in mind when looking for information about your family. Links to the newspaper where the social news was found are included so the original can be viewed and verified.
The first database we have uploaded is a list of engagement announcements found in the ΦΩΝΙ ΤΩΝ ΚΥΘΗΡΑ newspaper only. The database can be found here. The dates included are 1897-1899 and 1924-1934. Copies of newspapers from 1900 to 1923 are not available or copies no longer exist.
It is exciting that these dates cover announcements from our parents or grandparents; people we knew and remember. How fantastic to have a small piece of information about the people we loved!
We are continually reading the historic newspapers and this engagement database will be updated regularly. The next update will include different newspaper titles with similar dates and will be added in the coming weeks. These announcements were paid for and submitted by individuals to be published in the local Kytherian newspapers, so different newspaper titles will have different information. At the time of submitting an event to be published, I wonder if anybody thought their descendants would be reading it 100 years in the future.
The most exciting part of this database is that people submitted information from all over the world. It was a great way of letting family and friends in Kythera know of major family announcements from all over the world. As you can imagine, many announcements were from people living in Kythera, Australia and America at the time. This information is often available elsewhere online (although not engagements), but wonderful listings from Smyrna, Egypt, Sudan or even Russia are not available anywhere else. This information is priceless.
Also included in the newspaper social news are marriages, death, births, baptisms, arrivals in Athens, departures from Athens and donations. Some or all of these databases will be added in the next few weeks. Once these databases have all been added we will continue to read the newspapers year by year and update the databases as we go.
Newspaper social announcements are not the only databases we will be making available on our website. We are working on more documents and the process is very time consuming to get the information presented in a user friendly manner. When they are all uploaded you will be able to see the quantity of work that has been done by Kytherian Genealogy Project by Amalia and Kalie over the last 14 or more years. We will have literally tens of thousands of pieces of information available to be searched from the comfort of you own home, all in English. A lot of these documents have been translated from Greek hand-written documents that the majority of descendants in countries such as Australia and America are unable to read.
How wonderful would it be if you could eventually trace an entire family tree back to the mid to early 1600s and have an insight to major events or trivialities of their lives?
I hope you will learn a little more about your family history from our website so that the memories of these people can stay alive for generations to come.
Enjoy.