bluebird research

I have written previously about the insights which historic travelogues can provide for family historians and others interested in Old World homelands. It is true that they may be partisan, and prey to a whole host of prejudices and received opinions about places and peoples. They may also be tantalising – one wishes that the author had dwelt longer on a particular subject, or written in greater detail about a place that is of especial interest to the reader but receives only a passing mention from the author. But by their very nature these books were produced by outsiders, and therefore tend to be detached and unsentimental; they are written with fresh eyes keen to see and to compare with what they know; and it is rare that ones come away at the end of such travel-writing without an enlarged sense of what the place was like in the past. 

I have just finished reading Henry Fanshawe Tozer’s Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor, which was published originally in 1881 but is now widely available as a scanned print-on-demand volume (my own copy is from Elibron Classics, which has a nice range of historic travel writings). Tozer’s name alone is surely enough to identify him as a Victorian gent with an interest in the classics and antiquities. More specifically, he was a graduate of Oxford, a clerk in holy orders, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His main intellectual sphere of interest was Greece and the decaying Ottoman Empire. 

Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor was the fruit of Tozer’s travels from July to September 1879, in other words very shortly after the famine of 1874 and the Russo-Turkish war of 1877/78. His book is interesting from a number of different perspectives – as a testament to a type of 19th century English gentleman, now all but extinct, and their manners abroad; as a record of the distressed state of the region in the late 1870s; for its descriptions of places and peoples met along the way, including typical habitations and features of agriculture; and for oddities such as manna and fat-tailed sheep. 

To me it is also interesting for its definition of Armenia. I have tended to use fairly interchangeably the terms “Anatolia” and “Asia Minor” (which may be regarded respectively as Turkish and Greek concepts) to represent the entire geographical area of modern Turkey. Not so Tozer. For him, Asia Minor or Anatolia has a clear meaning; at a certain point travelling west to east, it gives way to Armenia; just as the latter segues into Kurdistan to the south and what might be called Pontus running along the southern seaboard of the Black Sea. More specifically, what separates Asia Minor from Armenia is the mountain range called the Anti-Taurus, or Aladağlar in Turkish. On the western side lie towns such as Kaiserieh (Turkish Kayseri) and Sivas which, although having an Armenian population as well as Turkish and Greek, are not in Armenia. Once you cross the Anti-Taurus you reach Armenia – ergo, the towns of Kharput (Turkish Elâzığ), Mush (Muş) and Erzeroum (Erzurum) are in Armenia. This is not to say that the towns are exclusively Armenian, for they were not – indeed, in Kharput, for example, Tozer estimates that there were only 500 Armenian households against up to 4,500 Turkish households. Rather, the towns were the outposts and centres of Ottoman rule; while the countryside was predominantly Armenian (Tozer writes that “the villages in the plain are almost entirely occupied by Armenians”) and here as everywhere it is the country which defines the national character of a region. Incidentally, many American-Armenians have immigrant ancestors who give “Kharput” (or a variant such as Harput, Kharberd, Kharpert etc) as their place of origin on passenger lists and manifests, petitions for naturalisation etc – it is important to exercise caution and not to assume that the ancestor was from the town itself rather than one of the multitude of Armenian villages in its catchment area. 

Even in Armenia by Tozer’s definition, the Armenians “do not form an absolute majority of the population”. As Tozer states, “bad government” has led to much emigration, amplified by the recent war which drove Turkish Armenians into Russian Armenia. Moreover, Circassians had settled in Armenia after fleeing the Russian Empire during and following the Russo-Circassian Wars, and Kurds were pushing north and occupying former Armenian villages, further affecting the balance of population. Nevertheless, by rights the Republic of Armenia today should extend west, a third of the way across eastern Turkey, to Kharput. That it does not is the fault of multiple factors, principle among them the 1915 Genocide but also including the successive abandonment of the Armenian people by all the victorious Allies and Soviet Russia after WW1.

23rd to 29th January 2012 was Holocaust Memorial Week. It is fitting that this week the French Senate passed a bill which will make denial of a different Holocaust – the Armenian genocide of 1915 – illegal in France. 

Imagine if, more than 65 years after the fact, the German or Austrian state denied the Holocaust. It’s unthinkable. Although in neither case was the state apparatus entirely cleansed of Nazis and their sympathisers, responsibility for the Shoah was accepted, reparation was made, and laws enacted which make Holocaust denial a criminal offence (as the pea-brained British historian David Irving found out during his 13 months in an Austrian gaol). 

Yet nearly 100 years have passed since the Turkish state, in its then guise of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, perpetrated the 1915 Genocide of the Armenians, and still the Turkish state, academia and society generally refuse not just to accept responsibility but even to acknowledge the historic fact of the Genocide. 

The Ottoman Empire was corrupt and incompetent but at least it was multinational and, for the most part, despite systemic discrimination embodied in law, in practice it was not always intolerant of minorities and other races and religions within its borders. The modern Republic of Turkey, on the other hand, was built upon Turkish nationalist and supremacist foundations. Turkey has tried to cleanse its territory of other peoples, through violence, expulsion and coercion. After the Armenians and Greeks were neutralised in Turkey, the only really large minority group remaining on its territory are the Kurds, who retain their identity despite more than eight decades of Turkish state persecution. The Kurds do not yet have a state of their own, nor do they have influential friends in USA or elsewhere prepared to support their rights. However, one can expect this to happen in time and Turkey’s reaction then will be interesting. In the meantime, the centenary of the Armenian genocide approaches in 2015 and one can expect further and ever more strident denials emanating from Ankara.

The latest in the series of Bluebird Research maps showing the location of Armenian communities across the Middle East is for Lebanon. This shows places of worship for all three Armenian confessions – Armenian Apostolic, Armenian Catholic and Armenian Evangelical (or Protestant). As well as identifying the churches, in addition the settlements and districts with a significant Armenian population are also displayed.

Click here to open the Armenian communities of Lebanon Google Map.

Bluebird Research has created a Google Map showing the location of the Armenian communities and places of worship in Syria.

The Armenian population of modern Syria is concentrated in Aleppo (Armenian Haleb) and in a long line of settlements just south of the Turkish border, stretching from Kesab and its satellite villages above the Mediterranean Sea, east along the frontier to Derik (or Al Malikiyah).

Hagop Goudsouzian is a Canadian-Armenian documentary film-maker and two of his works are of particular value to Armenians in diaspora interested in family history and questions of identity. 

The first is Armenian Exile, instalment one of a three-part work-in-progress. You can read about (and, if interested, order a copy on DVD) here. 

The second part of Goudsouzian’s trilogy is My Son Shall Be Armenian, which is available to view online or to purchase on DVD at the National Film Board of Canada website.  

The final part of the trilogy is due out soon.

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.

Sasun (also Sasoun or Sassoun) is both a village and the name of the eponymous district in Western Armenia, now Sason in Turkey. Like the surrounding region of the Ottoman Empire – the Anatolian towns of Bitlis, Diyarbakir and Mush – it was ethnically cleansed and systematically depopulated of its Armenians by the Turkish state forces and irregulars. Massacres occurred during 1893/94 and its aftermath, and again in 1904, before the 1915 Genocide and the Great War finally eliminated the Armenians from the land. 

Those local Armenians, or Sasuntsis, who were not killed or converted under duress to Islam, went into hiding or fled Turkey. In 1917/18, many of the remaining local families accompanied the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Turkey, some not simply crossing the Russian border but continuing refugee journeys on to Tiflis, to Vladikavkas and to Armavir (the Russian town near Krasnodar which had been founded by Cherkesogai Armenians in the early 19th century). Their descendants are now either in diaspora (for instance, in Russia or having left via Batumi or some other Black Sea port for America) or in the modern Republic of Armenia. In Armenia, they settled especially in villages in the Talin area of Aragatsotn province – places such as Mastara, Nerkin Sasunashen and Shgharshik. 

What this small story illustrates is that while it is true that few Armenians in the English-speaking diaspora have roots (= ancestors born) within the current borders of Armenia, it is likely that a significant number have distant relatives living there today. These kin – cousins two or three or more times removed – will be either the descendants of Armenians who fled Turkey directly into Russian Armenia, or returnees (hayrenadarts). Returnees or repatriates are Armenians who emigrated to Soviet Armenia, usually not having been born in the territory, so that the return or repatriation is emotional rather than literal. They came at various times but especially in 1931-33 and again during the 1946-48 Nerkaght or Homecoming. Most had been born, or would have had parents born, in Ottoman Turkey but they came to Soviet Armenia from Cyprus, Egypt, Iran and Syria and also from further afield, from France and Greece and America. Many, especially those tempted by Soviet propaganda, may have been disappointed with conditions upon arrival in Armenia but nevertheless made a life in their adopted homeland.

Bluebird Research has created a Google Map which shows the Armenian Apostolic (Gregorian) churches in Constantinople (Istanbul or Bolis, “the city”), Turkey for which there are surviving historical parish registers of use for Armenian family history research.

Note that churches for which there are no known surviving historical parish records are not shown.

Similarly, Armenian Catholic churches are not depicted on the map.

If you have Constantinople (Bolsahye) roots and would like professional assistance with your Armenian genealogical research, please feel free to contact Bluebird Research for a detailed free assessment.

To help family historians with Armenian ancestors from the Kars region, Bluebird Research has created an online map identifying and displaying the location of Armenian villages in the then Russian oblast of Kars circa 1900-1914.

These villages were from 1878 to 1917 in Russian Armenia (and this is how they are usually described in, for example, American and Canadian passenger lists, naturalisation records and census returns) but since the end of WW1 have been incorporated into Turkey.

Most of the village names have now changed – both modern Turkish and the old Russian, Armenian and indeed Turkish names are given on the map.

This map should be used in conjunction with our other recent (March 2011) posts on this subject.

Please click here to view the Armenian Villages in Kars Province map in Google Maps.

The table below is a name concordance showing the Armenian settlements of Kars province (oblast) of the period 1900s/1910s. It is designed to be used in conjunction with the two extracts from late Imperial Russian gazetteers on this website – the 1902 and 1914 editions – to help Armenian family historians to locate their ancestral villages. Please contact us for further assistance if required, or if you are interested in our professional genealogical research services.

The table gives a) the names as transliterated from the Russian Cyrillic in Imperial Russian official publications, b) their Armenian names in standard transliteration and c) their modern Turkish names.

All errors are the blogger’s own. Additions and corrections are welcomed.

The table below shows the Armenian settlements of Kars province (oblast) with their Armenian population as at 1913. A village (selo) or town (gorod) was located within a community (obshtina), and communities within a district (okrug). The table, with its companion for 1901, is intended to help Armenian family historians to locate their ancestral villages.

Unless otherwise indicated, all villages were entirely Armenian and were of the Apostolic (Gregorian) faith. 

The table uses simple transliterations from the Russian, without replacing hard signs or soft signs, and does not attempt to render the place names in a correct transliteration from the Armenian language. 

All errors are the blogger’s own.

Source: 1914 Address-Calendar for Kars Province

The Kars region was administered by the Russian Empire from 1878 to 1917. The table below shows the Armenian settlements of the then Kars province (oblast) with their Armenian population as at 1901. A village (selo) or town (gorod) was located within a community (obshtina), and communities within a district (okrug). The table, with its companion for 1913, is intended to help Armenian family historians to locate their ancestral villages.

Unless otherwise shown, all villages were entirely Armenian and of the Apostolic (Gregorian) faith.

The table uses simple transliterations from the Russian, without replacing hard signs or soft signs, and does not attempt to render the place names in a correct transliteration from the Armenian language.

All errors are the blogger’s own.

Source: 1902 Address-Calendar for Kars Province

Among the Californian Armenian community is a disproportionate number of descendants of immigrants from the small village of Karakala, or Kara-Kala, near Kars. On incoming American passenger lists and in naturalisation records, the place of origin of these immigrants will usually be shown as Russian Armenia, because the region around the city of Kars became the Russian Karsskaya oblast from 1878 to 1917. Before that period, the region was part of the Ottoman Empire and therefore a minority of US immigration records, especially for those Armenians born in Karakala before 1878, may state Turkey or Ottoman Empire, rather than Russia, as place of birth.

There is little to be found on the internet – at least, in the English language and of value to genealogists – about Karakala. There is confusion as to its exact whereabouts. The primary reason for this confusion is that the place name is not unique: there are multiple candidates. Furthermore, place names changed under modern Turkey and some Armenian villages were completely razed and have disappeared from the map. However, the true location of Armenian Karakala can be determined with confidence.

Imperial Russia, like other late 19th century empires, took a lively interest in demographics and ethnography (not least because nationalism needed to be monitored as the single biggest challenge to empire). Russian gazetteers of the period show the administrative geography (the hierarchy of local government from regional capital down to village), the population breakdown and usually something of the ethnicity (natsionalnost or nationality in Russian) of the inhabitants. The colossal 1897 Russian Census was a monument to just such a preoccupation with the population of empire.

Gazetteers for Kars oblast record the entire population down to the smallest villages of no more than 50 inhabitants. The gazetteers for the 1900s and 1910s show consistently that there were nine places called Karakala in Kars oblast. However, Armenian Karakala – the source of the Californian immigrant population – is readily identified. Each of the various entries for the settlements named Karakala gives the nationality of its population. In this respect, while cities and towns in eastern Anatolia were usually of mixed population, the villages in the hinterland tended to be occupied by a single people. Only one of the nine places named Karakala had an Armenian population: of the remaining eight, seven were Muslim villages, identified carefully as Kurdish, Turcoman/Turkish and even Karapapak, and one a Yezidi village.

Under Russian rule, Armenian Karakala seems originally to have been classed as an obshestvo (community) in its own right, with the nearby Turkmen selo or village of Hadzhi-Halil subordinate to it, within the okrug (or district) of Magaradzhik (itself a Greek village). However, later Karakala lost its obshestvo status and became simply a selo like Hadzhi-Halil in Magaradzhik obshestvo in Magaradzhik okrug. The other two villages in the immediate grouping were Azat (which was Greek) and Kany-Kei (another Armenian settlement).

Across Kars oblast, the majority of Armenian settlements were growing rapidly during the years leading up to WW1, due to natural growth (families were large) and in-migration. Karakala was an exception to this trend. In 1902, the village comprised 464 souls (as they are described in the gazetteers) residing in 43 households; by 1914, it had 489 souls living in 79 homes. All were Armenian.  The explanation for the relatively slow growth in population size and reduction in household size in Karakala is the significant emigration from the village to North America.

So where is Karakala? It is situated 17.5km SSE of Kars and is today called Merkezkarakale. The prefix Merkez simply signifies its location in Kars Merkezi, or the central district of the Kars province of modern Turkey: this name was not used during the Ottoman or Imperial Russian eras. 8km to the NNW is Azat; about 5km to the N is Magaradzhik, now called either Mağaracık or Ataköy in Turkish; 5km to the NW is Kany-Kei, now known as Gelirli; and 2km to the S is Hadzhi-Halil, now spelt Hacıhalil.

Bluebird Research has created two Google Maps showing a) Armenian Karakala in the context of the other Armenian settlements in Kars and b) Armenian Karakala along with the non-Armenian villages named Karakala. A third map shows Armenian Karakala in the context of the surrounding villages of different ethnicity or nationality.

There is an old photograph of the village of Armenian Karakala online. If one studies Merkezkarakale in satellite view at high magnification on the Bluebird Research Google Map, one thing that is noticeable and common to both photograph and satellite image is the village’s linear structure – essentially it is a single street with plots to the left and right set back at different short distances from the road. Although 100 or more years may have passed, and the village will have been rebuilt and extended, and perhaps shifted its centre of gravity, its basic plan seems remarkably similar today. The axis of the village is NW to SE. The road in the satellite view, extending off to the right half way down the village street (heading roughly N), looks like a more organic recent development. The old photograph seems to have been shot from an elevation and may have been taken on the rising ground SE of the village.

This is the only village named Karakala with a linear settlement plan in the former Kars oblast. If one looks at each of them in turn at high magnification on the Google Map, it will be seen that all of the others are organic, sometimes seemingly random clusters of low buildings. Merkezkarakale is the only one with the planned look and feel of a linear village. It has been suggested that Armenian Karakala was built shortly after the Russian administration arrived in 1878; if so, then this would be consonant with the appearance of a “modern” rectilinear and planned layout.

The next step in research is to try to find out if there are any surviving genealogical records for Karakala; and, if so, where they are held; and whether they cover both the Apostolic and the village’s burgeoning Armenian Protestant or Evangelical sect known as the “Jumpers” which generated many of the emigrants to California.

If you are a family historian with Armenian roots in Karakala, especially a descendant of one of the original immigrants – such as Katanian, Keosababian, Mooshagian, Nalian, Perumian or Shaharian or Stepanian – we would be delighted to hear from you.

In the autumn of 1913, Noel and Harold Buxton travelled through the Armenian regions of Persia, Russia and Turkey, the next year publishing their account as Travels and Politics in Armenia (Smith, Elder & Co, 1914). “Tiflis”, they write, “is best known as the ancient capital of the Georgian kingdom, but today it is as much the capital of the Armenians as of any other race, for it has been the Armenians who have built up this modern city.” 

Tiflis, now Tbilisi, was indeed in many ways primarily an Armenian city until 1921, when it became the capital of the Soviet Republic of Georgia; many of those Armenians who had not already left by that date moved to the neighbouring Republic of Armenia, ostensibly independent again. 

The Armenian component of the population of Russian Tiflis grew throughout the 19th century: 16,807 in 1834, 28,488 in 1865, 37,610 in 1876 and 55,553 in 1897. It is true that the percentage started to fall with the rapid growth of the city (from 74% in 1803 down to the 38% at the time of the 1897 Russian census). However, this reflects the position held by Armenians in Tiflis society. 

Whereas both the nobility and the working class in Tiflis were Georgian, and the Georgian working class mushroomed with immigration from the surrounding villages, the city’s middle class was overwhelmingly Armenian. They were skilled craftsmen, the merchants controlling the caravansarais, the owners of the hotels and cafes, and, as the century wore on, the financiers and industrialists largely responsible for developing the Tiflis economy during the rapid expansion it enjoyed under Imperial Russian rule. International trade, always significant in Tiflis, flourished even more with the opening of the railway to the Black Sea port of Poti (1872) and the Caspian Sea port of Baku (1883). Armenians resided in all quarters of the town but especially in Sololaki and Havlabar (Avlabari) districts. 

Not all Tiflis Armenians had family names which one would instantly recognise today as being distinctively Armenian. Sometimes surname endings were Russified, to -ev, -oev or -ov (for example, Kevorkov and Pitoev). Names could be transliterated into the Latin alphabet in various ways – for example, a name could be spelt Alikhanov, Alikhanyan, Alikhanian or Alikhanyants. The suffix -ants was common in fact – for example, in names such as Sarkisiants, more familiar today as Sarkisian. Occasionally, you may see the suffix -ant or -antz.

Bluebird Research may be able to assist you with Armenian family history research in Tbilisi or elsewhere in Georgia. Please send us full details of the background information you hold and we would be glad to provide an opinion without any charge.