Crucial Steps for Tracing Your Armenian Family Tree
This presentation focuses on the many sources available for tracing your family tree, including the tips and tricks for finding living family members you don’t know you have and records about your ancestors that aren’t available on the genealogy sites like Ancestry.com. Information is out there! You just have to know how to find it!
Researching Family Trees: The Experience from Hayastan
This presentation addresses the contemporary phenomenon of tohmagrutyun (genealogy) and tohmatsar (genealogical tree) in the Republic of Armenia. Since the 1990s, popularenthusiasm among the Armenians who descend from the Ottoman-Armenian genocide
survivors to create pedigrees has been running high. On display in the living rooms as artworks or kept in the family archives for future generations, the genealogical trees constitute a part of Armenians’ everyday life. The trees mainly bring family members who descend from the same paternal grandparents together in solving the puzzle of who is who,
how they are related, where they came from. But beyond this simple function, they also serve as a versatile means to explain different approaches Armenians take in their practice of pedigree-making. I summarize these approaches into three categories. The first category
concerns the territorialized vs. non-territorial genealogical trees. While some trees feature the ancestral homelands in the Ottoman Empire (Ergir) as the spatial origins of families, others remain non-territorial. The second is regarding the ascending vs. descending genealogies. While ascending trees place emphasis on the genealogical roots (origins), descending trees focus on the branches of current generations (posterity). The third
approach is about the dichotomies between patrilineal trees and gender-inclusive trees. The former type only records the genealogical information of the agnatic descendants of lineages and leaves the branches of women pruned. The latter, on the other hand, takes an inclusive approach and includes the lines descending from women.
Armenian Immigration Project Sessions
Are you interested in learning more about your Armenian immigrant ancestors, where they originated, and how they came to America? Would you like to discover new extended family? Join us for an interesting presentation by Mark Arslan to discuss his research tool, the Armenian Immigration Project.
Genealogy of Armenian Recipes; Mapping the Armenian Homeland
A map of any modern-day country will not tell you its history but its food will. Why is mantu made shaped in tiny boats in Europe but shaped in tiny square parcels in Asia? Can we trace our ancestor’s places of origin from the ingredients they used? Yes. To this day, the boundaries defined by food and language often reflect the differences between people much more accurately that the lines drawn arbitrarily on maps. I will present a case for creating and building a genealogy of Armenian recipes by collecting every recipe passed down by families; that fragile link to our past that must be carefully preserved as much as any family genealogical chart.