Reminiscing our Roots
It has become an accepted fact of life, in the modern world, that the Internet, with its global tentacles of communication, networking, data archiving, and ease of access, has contributed tremendously to multitudes of people and society, across the great divide, and has also brought immense value to the lives of people in many convenient ways. This facility, while providing an essential means of acquiring knowledge and data for students, academics and professionals, has also opened the doors of research, communication, sharing and interaction, wide open, to hobbyists, historians, and others pursuing their own interests in people, places events and society.
Amongst these interests, the research and sharing of genealogy data has become one of the most popular online activities of people of all ages interested in searching and mapping their ancestry and archiving this valuable family data for posterity. The colonization of nations and the continuous migration of people across national and international borders, over centuries, has also become an integral criteria for many families to try and preserve the origins of their roots for the sake and benefit of their progeny.
How has the internet contributed to genealogy research, and what are the significant developments that have been achieved by the utilization of genealogy as an Internet-based hobby?
Genealogy, from ancient times, has always been of immense interest to humanity, mainly, because of its value in keeping family ties intact and enabling people to be able to recognize, understand and accept their roots, relationships, links, obligations, responsibilities and social status. Another factor where genealogy served effectively was in ensuring that people do not commit incest by engaging in marital relationships with their blood siblings and relatives by being able to differentiate between immediate family members and non family members.
Genealogy also has its roots in all religions whereby specific religious laws related to marriage, divorce and inheritance are based upon the links of blood ties and kinship to one another.
In ancient times, genealogy data was purely confined to the minds and memories of the members of the community who knew the links of kinship based on the fact that the families were very close-knit and lived in extended family communions within small ranges of space.
Subsequently, with the advent of writing, scribes began to record family trees in various formats on diverse media that became available from time to time ending with paper in the last century. Governments, Regulatory and Administrative bodies, Religious entities and even individual families themselves, also began to record such data for obvious official reasons and thereby archives of genealogy data have been preserved in various records that can still be searched and retrieved across the globe. With the advent of the typewriter and the print media some even ventured into the publication of their family trees for posterity.
The big bang emergence of the information technology era into human society in the early twentieth century saw the successful introduction of electronic word-processing, graphical representation, programming and electronic storage which provided a very tempting feeding ground for genealogy researchers to look for greener pastures to carry on their collection, formatting and archiving of genealogy data. Further, the networking and communication facilities that technology provided made it much more convenient, practical, and easily accessible for genealogy researchers across continents to be able to exchange, share, validate, compile, and publish their bits and pieces of family data into one big family tree online, accessible to the general public.
The Worldwide Web (WWW) that gave rise to the Internet in the same century has now become a true playing field for genealogy researchers to be able to carry on their hard work effectively and timely.
The Internet is a repository for vast amounts of data in varying formats composed, designed, styled and published using different techniques using several forms of representation. Websites are the most common form of this representation and are simple pages that contain text, graphics, forms, fields and many interesting interactive modes of communication within them. They are also interconnected to other websites and web pages via links using the html representation that is standard to the internet. In recent times Web Logs or Blogs have become a very popular means for people to archive their thoughts, data and information.
Other forms of internet content, that are commonly used by genealogy researchers, are Message Boards, Chat Rooms, Forums and Genealogy Databases, that provide a variety of ways for data to be shared, exchanged, discussed, debated and stored.
My personal interest into Sri Lanka Genealogy began, way back in the sixties, when I was a teenager assisting my paternal Grandfather, Mohamed Sameer, to record his voluminous archives of research of the history and beginnings of the Ceylon Moors, using a wide carriage Olivetti Typewriter.
It was when he passed away in the mid 1970's that the onerous task of continuing his hard work dawned upon me. It would have been a waste of his hard work and energy if no one had taken the cudgel to keep his work alive.
My career in IT which began in 1970, working with IBM in Colombo, took me overseas for a job assignment with Citibank Technology in 1979. It was during this period that I started using the facilities of a database, designed by me, to capture and archive all the researched genealogy data.
The Worldwide Genealogy Website Forum, hosted by Rootsweb, had, by then allocated disk space for all the nations of the world to utilize for their genealogy archives with a view to having it available for public view. When I contacted them online by email and sent them the data that I had already researched and archived they were so enamoured that they offered me the honour of hosting all Sri Lanka Genealogy on their web domain.
Thus was born the Sri Lanka Genealogy Website - http://www.rootsweb.com/~lkawgw on the internet. My initial task was to create a suitable Home Page that would explain what the site aimed at achieving and also providing valuable information about various aspects of the country. The site went live online in April 1999.
At this point of time I only had researched Sri Lanka Moor Genealogy and was now burdened with the enormous task of having to seek information about the families of all the other communities in the Island. The first to respond to my nagging inquiries was the erstwhile Burgher Community, whose members already possessed large volumes of genealogy data in manual and automated formats. Church records and the numerous volumes of the Journal of the Dutch Burgher Union had preserved many family trees in tact, some beginning from the early sixteenth century during Dutch times. The responses I received were numerous and if not for the lightning fast facility of email it would have not been possible to collect so much of data in such a short span of time.
The Message Boards provided by Rootsweb also served as a very valuable forum for interaction between genealogy researchers seeking and exchanging their little bits and pieces of data to create the bigger picture over time.
Sinhalese, Tamil, Colombo Chetty, Malay, Memon, Borah and other community genealogy slowly started pouring in from different corners of the globe. The existing websites on the internet also provided a valuable source of data for both genealogy and historical data of Sri Lanka. Several publications in English on Sri Lankan families also provided another useful source of information and validation. The Department of National Archives, in Colombo, also offered another great repository for research.
The website, now, has a large collection of family tree data with corresponding links to connected families, by marriage and other criteria, section pages related to history, geography, people, events, communities, literature, alumni, military, lists, and also an interesting section titled "Serendipity". The site has more than 100,000 hits during the past 8 years which amounts to almost 40 hits per day.
One of the most difficult aspects of managing the website is in maintaining a serious and continuous dialogue with the many inquiries and information that is currently being exchanged on an on-going basis between the many interested genealogy researchers across the globe. Collating, formatting and uploading the data into the relevant section pages on the web is also a very time consuming exercise which has required special commitment and diligence in ensuring integrity and correctness.
Input from various interested people across the globe has also been most encouraging in keeping the website alive and up to date with information.
The website has also provided a very useful means of bringing people together from far-away locations who had lost contact with each other through time on account of migration, marriages, education and the like.
In addition there are several blog sites pertaining to Sri Lanka, places of interest and its people that I have been working on and are available for review and comment by those interested, online at:
http://kermeey.blogspot.com
http://lankaperson.blogspot.com
http://livinglanka.blogspot.com
http://rcpeople.blogspot.com
http://sgenweb.googlepages.com
http://fazlis.googlepages.com
http://livinglanka.googlepages.com
http://kadalayroyal.blogspot.com
fazlisameer started this discussion 6 months ago. ( )