Archive for October, 2011
There has been an Armenian community in what is today Iran and what was formerly Persia for many centuries, and some extremely ancient Armenian Apostolic churches are to be found in the north of the country – for example, the so-called “black church” of Surp Tade Vank south of the town of Maku and the Surp Stepanos Maghartavank monastery in a gorge near Julfa which form part of a UNESCO-recognised world heritage ensemble of exceptional interest.
Armenians of the Ottoman Empire sought refuge in Persia at the time of the 1915 Genocide, while other immigrants arrived after the Russian Revolution, and the Armenian population of Iran may have risen to a million or more at its peak. Today, however, the community is dwindling due to emigration, although not on account of political or religious factors, as one might assume. While there is some inevitable discrimination given that modern Iran is by definition an Islamic state, a majority of those local Armenians leaving Iran are doing so for economic reasons and emigrating particularly to USA (rather than to the Republic of Armenia or Western Europe). Some of the traditionally strong Armenian communities, such as those in the New Julfa (or Nor Jugha) quarter on the south side of Isfahan and in the city of Tabriz and the vicinity of Lake Urmia, have seen significant drops in population. Although the actual figures seem to be unknown and the process of emigration is continuing, it is thought that the total Armenian population of Iran may have fallen to as low as 75,000 in the years since the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew the liberal, westward-leaning Shah.
The Armenians in parts of Persia also had strong links with India and especially with the British in India, operating alongside (and often on behalf of) the Honourable East India Company along the overland trade routes to the subcontinent. This is why there are Armenian churches in various cities in India, even though the actual Armenian community is now greatly reduced in number. Armenian cemeteries are also important for those British researchers with East India Company connections, as the burials of the British usually took place in Armenian cemeteries where there was not a Church of England or other Protestant church. In Iran this practice remained prevalent until the end of the 19th century. A very good example of this is at the port of Bushire (Bushehr) in Iran. See the websites produced by Liz Chater and Abdol Rasool Shadman for some transcriptions and photographs of the cemetery.
Bluebird Research has produced a Google Map showing the Armenian communities and places of worship (not all extant today) in Iran. If you have Armenian roots in Iran, or experience of Armenian family history research in Iran, we would be delighted to hear from you and may be able to assist you with your genealogical research.
Bluebird Research has created a Google Map showing the location of today’s Armenian communities in Iraq.
The Armenian population of the country is declining – since 2003, many Armenians in the major cities have either moved to safer rural locations, especially in Kurdistan, or left Iraq altogether and emigrated to other lands in the Middle-East (for example, Syria) or to the Republic of Armenia or to Europe or USA.
Earlier this year there were reports that register offices and state archives in Belarus had started to take an uncooperative stance towards Belarusian citizens of Polish descent seeking to document their immediate ancestry. The number of applicants applying for documentary evidence of vital events – birth or baptism, marriage, death or burial – for their parents, grandparents and great grandparents had risen sharply. However, this was not due to a sudden interest in Polish family history in Belarus. Rather, acquiring such certificates proving Polish ancestry has the practical effect of enabling a Belarusian citizen to enter Poland without a visa, following a new law which took effect in Poland in March 2008.
Belarus under Lukashenko is sometimes described as the last Stalinist state in Eastern Europe. The general standard of living is low, unemployment high, and a number of basic freedoms taken for granted across the rest of Europe are denied. Movement across the border into Poland – a member state of the European Union and relatively affluent compared to Belarus – is therefore a potentially attractive option for Belarusians with Polish roots. Furthermore, the so-called Karta Polaka which is issued by Polish consular authorities to the Belarusian Poles entitles them not just to free movement into Poland but also the right to employment without a work permit and to receive some state benefits include schooling and emergency healthcare.
The Belarusian state regards the issuing of the Karta Polaka with suspicion and is attempting to stem the flow of its citizens into Poland by denying them the necessary civil registration or Roman Catholic parish register documents required to make the application to the Polish consular authorities.
Belarus is of course not the only state affected by the Polish state’s extension of certain privileges to ethnic Poles outside its borders. The same law applies to all citizens of the successor states to the former USSR. While this has limited applicability in, for example, Estonia, where there are few Poles, it has potentially significant repercussions to states on Poland’s eastern border (Lithuania and Ukraine as well as Belarus) and to those more remote former Soviet republics to which many victims of the periodic purges and repressions of the minority nationalities of the Soviet Union were deported (for example, Kazakhstan).
The Karta Polaka has excited much interest and there are reports of hundreds of thousands of applicants at Polish consulates in such places as Ivano-Frankivs’k, Luts’k, L’viv and Vinnytsia in Ukraine, as well as Grodno and Brest in Belarus.
As the Karta Polaka is only issued to citizens of the former Soviet states named in the Polish legislation, it is unlikely that access restrictions to family history records will extend to genealogists in the worldwide Polish diaspora. However, these recent developments are likely to fuel the general nervousness and suspiciousness of some civil servants – both registrars and archivists – in Belarus and we may find that the level of cooperation and speed of service is affected when undertaking genealogical research in Belarus.
Traditionally a Muslim marriage in rural Bosnia was primarily a matter of fulfillment of local social customs, not of formal recognition by the state or the Islamic authorities. In fact, nearly always such temporal or spiritual validation of a union merely sealed a fait accompli. In the former Yugoslavia, a couple, once wedded according to local custom, would attend the relevant municipal register office of their district and there obtain a marriage certificate; the civil ceremony was short and required only two witnesses, there were seldom guests present and the couple was simply meeting the legal requirements of the secular state. An Islamic ceremony might then follow in the groom’s home (not the mosque) with the hodža (or imam) blessing the marriage, but a great many couples dispensed with this religious ceremony.
Before WW2, some Muslim couples in Yugoslavia did not bother with the civic ceremony and therefore their marriage was not legally recognised by the state. Instead they would register their marriage with the kadi for the district, who would issue them with an Islamic marriage contract.
The genealogist might wish to note that a Bosnian Muslim marriage might not be legalised until weeks, months or even a year or more after the event (for instance, at the same time as registering the birth of the first child of the marriage, especially when the couple’s village was some distance from the municipal register office).
There was seldom a long engagement. The ideal wedding according to custom would be one at which there was a procession, a communal feast and an elaborate exchange of gifts, and of course this required careful planning which might well extend the engagement period. However, for reasons of expediency and economy, a significant number of brides were married swiftly “through the window” rather than through the door. What this idiom means is that the couple eloped, although not as the term is usually understood in, for example, Western Europe or North America. Often the elopement was an open secret in the village, and the groom’s family and not infrequently the bride’s were aware of the plans; the stylised elopement simply enabled the wedding to take place without the grand fuss of the feasting and the ritualised and expensive gift-giving. In the cases of genuine elopement, the groom would come to his bride-to-be’s bedroom window in the evening and she would steal away into the night. The couple would not be absconding, though – instead, they would go straight to the groom’s family home. The traditional residence pattern in rural Bosnia was heavily patrilocal, meaning that upon marriage the bride immediately took up residence in the groom’s house, which usually meant in her mother-in-law’s house (until such time as the groom had funds to build his own house). After the elopement, male kin of the groom would then visit the bride’s household, bearing gifts, to make peace.
Another facet of Bosnian Muslim relations in rural areas is a customary prohibition against marriage within nine degrees of kinship (this was true of Bosnian Christians as well). Of course not everyone had such an in-depth understanding of their ancestry or the often complex network of inter-relationships in the village, and the prohibition might be more observed in the breach. Nevertheless, the practical effect of this, in combination with the patrilocality, was that in small rural communities most women married outside their native village into the village of their husband. What this means is that the men in a small village tended to be native to it, while a majority of the married women came from outside. This is another feature of Bosnian Muslim life in the smaller rural communities which it is worth bearing in mind when researching your family tree.