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  • Mumbai: Documenting an Armenian heritage

    DNA Daily News & Analysis, India
    June 22 2013

    Documenting an Armenian heritage

    Saturday, Jun 22, 2013, 19:02 IST | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA


    A British born researcher is actively working to preserve photographic
    evidence of every birth, marriage and death of the Armenian community
    in India, a process which if done earlier would've helped Prince
    William find his Armenian roots.

    Liz Chater was born in the UK. When the news broke that Lady came from
    a family that could be traced back to Armenian ancestors in India, she
    was bombarded with queries from interested people interested in
    finding the family's graves. Chater, after all, is quite the expert on
    Armenians in India. This family history researcher specialises in
    Armenians in India and the Far East and is dedicated to Armenian
    family history in India (1600-1950).

    Her interest is tracing her family stems from not knowing anything
    about its origins - she knew about her mother's side (who is Welsh)
    but Liz's father, who died in 1983, never talked about his family back
    in Kolkata. `My search took me to the British Library in London where
    on my first visit, I was lucky enough to be able to trace many members
    of my father's side of the family. I posted some queries to a
    genealogy mailing list and an Armenian researcher called Nadia Wright,
    who specialises in Armenians in Singapore and Malaysia, told me the
    names were Armenian. This was the first I knew that I had Armenian
    ancestors in my family," she says.

    Having discovered her Armenian heritage, she started looking for
    information. "There was very little, if any, information on the
    internet. Wanting to help others with their own Armenian family
    history in India I started a small website and with each new piece of
    information or discovery, I added it on," she adds.

    In 2005, she made her first trip to Kolkata where she visited the
    church and the graves. She then started photographing graves and in
    the evenings would transcribe them and upload it on her website. "It
    was an immediate hit." By the end of her trip, she had taken over
    3000 photographs of graves and church registers with a view to
    transcribing them. After six months, she found an Armenian doctor
    willing to translate the registers. At the end of 2007 The Families in
    British India Society www.fibis.org had placed the whole of the
    Armenian Church baptism register (1793-1859) of the Holy Nazareth
    Church Kolkata on their website. This was the first time that it had
    been translated from Armenian into English.

    "By 2007, I had decided that I wanted to start a project `Armenian
    Graves in India' and I travelled to India and photographed the whole
    of the churchyards at the Holy Nazareth Church, St. Gregory's, and
    Tangra respectively. In 2008 I completed Chinsurah, Saidabad, and
    Chennai (Madras) respectively and along the way donations of
    photographs of graves in Agra , Mumbai (Bombay) and Surat have helped
    to continue my Armenian history in India project," she says.

    Many of the graves in Chater's collection have dual inscriptions in
    Armenian and English. But Chater still has some 3,000 photographs of
    Armenian graves whose inscriptions are written only in Armenian that
    she hasn't been able to translate yet. For this she is relying on the
    Armenian community to help her.

    Chater's work can be viewed on website www.chater-genealogy.com

    http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/1851550/report-documenting-an-armenian-heritage

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