Archive for the ‘cyprus’ Category
This week the family history website Find My Past has published the central index to the register of merchant seamen on British vessels. The original record series was created by the then Registrar General of Shipping and Seaman (part of the Board of Trade). It is now held on microfiche at The National Archives in Kew, England and can be seen under shelf references BT348, BT349 and BT350.
The resource takes the shape of record cards which form a central index to seamen registered to serve on British-registered vessels within the period from approximately 1918 to 1941.
What makes the Central Index Register cards interesting from an Eastern European genealogical research perspective is that many of those employed in the British merchant navy were engaged at overseas ports. For example, there are large numbers of records relating to Estonian, Greek and Latvian sailors. Additionally, there are smaller but still significant quantities of seamen from Cyprus, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, and even some from landlocked Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Some of these men may have settled and even become naturalised in Britain but presumably a majority remained citizens or subjects of their country of birth.
The front and back of each index card have been scanned and an online index published so that the records of individual merchant marines can be searched for and located. Two, three or more cards of different dates exist for some individuals.
The cards evolved a little over time, from CR1 to CR2 to CR10 types, and the details recorded changed too. However, the basic format remains the same, as does the core detail of name, year and place of birth, rating, Discharge A Number, ship name and/or official registered number, and date. Some cards give physical descriptions, while others sport a black and white passport-style photograph and signature.
The data is handwritten onto the printed index cards. The handwriting is not always legible and may be faint or contain abbreviations. The place of birth information on the cards will reflect the date at which they were created and the spellings current at that time, sometimes anglicised or misspelt. For example, the Estonian islands of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa often appear as Dagö and Ösel respectively (typically minus their diacritics), being their old Swedish names, and similarly the Saaremaa capital Kuressaare is often given as Arensburg.
This online collection is not a complete record of those sailing on British merchant vessels between the Wars. The majority of cards dating from 1913 to 1921 are known to have been destroyed in 1969. Moreover, a fourth record series at The National Archives (shelf reference BT364) is not being published, on account of data protection and personal privacy concerns. The series BT364 also covers the period 1921 to 1941 and was extracted from the materials that now comprise BT348 to BT350 inclusive. It remains possible that this series, which has also been scanned and indexed, may be released too in due course.
A final note: while some of the individuals contained within these records will have seen service additionally in the Royal Navy at some date, it must be emphasised that the majority would have served only on British merchant vessels and were not in the armed forces.
Records of interest to family historians can be found in unexpected places.
Researchers with experience of Central and Eastern European genealogy will know that records are often to be located outside the borders of a country, due to the complex history and shifting political map of the region. For instance, in Poland there are vital records for western Ukraine; in Germany there are records for some of the German communities of Romania; and in Austria there are army records for soldiers from the successor states of the Habsburg Empire.
For those with a family history rooted in the British Isles, the primary source of information for the British overseas is the General Register Office’s various series of indexes to armed forces, consular and maritime birth, marriage and death registers. They cover events relating not just to English and Welsh but also to Irish, Scottish and doubtless Manx and Channel Islander individuals. These are widely available online and have recently been fully name-indexed by Find My Past.
At New Register House in Edinburgh, the records of the births, marriages and deaths of Scots abroad are to be found among the statutory registers. These are also searchable online on the official Scotland’s People website, where they are called “minor records”. It is likely that there is some (possibly considerable?) overlap with the records held by the General Register Office of England & Wales described above.
Less well-known and rather surprising is the fact that the Catholic Registers on the Scotland’s People website include records from beyond Scotland. An overview document detailing the holdings can be downloaded. The document begins with the expected records of Catholic missions and parishes in Scotland itself. However, on page 3 it moves on to the Bishopric of the Forces. Among the Roman Catholic registers here there are of course records from within Scotland but a great many are from beyond its borders – and not just from England, Ireland and Wales. In fact, the collection covers Catholic registers of the British Forces across the world. For instance, there are volumes from Aden, Austria, Germany, Iraq, Lebanon, Malta and Singapore.
For those undertaking research within the region covered by Bluebird Research, the following may be of interest:
Cyprus
- Akrotiri RAF base 1956-1967
- RAF register 1957-1969
Egypt
- Alexandria chaplaincy of the English forces 1899-1910
- Cairo military vicariate 1896-1945
- Cairo 1904-1955
- Moascar camp 1925-1967
Although these Roman Catholic registers have been digitised by the Scottish authorities, the records contained within them do not just relate to Scots but, of course, to English, Irish, Welsh and all other Catholics in the British Armed Forces. At least one of the two parties will have been serving in the Forces at the time of the registration of the event. However, in the case of marriages, the other party to the marriage (usually but not invariably the bride) could be a civilian and, for that matter, a local from the vicinity of the Forces base. Likewise, of course, for births and baptisms of issue of such marriages.
All of Scotland’s People’s Roman Catholic registers before about 1908 can be viewed online (in contrast to the General Register Office’s records, for which only the indexes are publically available). For more recent records after 1908, there is a searchable index, upon the basis of which extracts from the registers (certificates) can be purchased.
A family historian in the English-speaking world searching speculatively for the marriage of an ancestor on an unknown date does not usually consider seasonality; that is, they have no preconceptions as to whether a wedding would or would not have taken place at any particular time of year. Furthermore, one rarely comes across any especially noticeable peaks or troughs in the frequency of marriages across the calendar year. Couples get married all year round, perhaps in the post-WW2 world showing a preference for summer weddings.
In contrast, in most rural societies across Eastern Europe before WW2 and certainly before WW1 when traditional ways of life were still very much intact, there was marked seasonality of marriage. This is reflected in the pages of any volume of a parish marriage register.
One of the two chief factors was the agricultural year. Throughout the growing season and especially during the harvest, farmers, smallholders and peasants were joined in the fields and in the processing of harvested crops by just about every available hand – villagers of both sexes and all ages would be involved and frequently laboured both long days and by moonlight. During this period, there was generally no time for marriage.
The second factor was the religious calendar. In particular, fasting created marriage seasonality. Especially in Eastern Orthodox communities, marriage was an occasion of extended feasting and therefore incompatible with the fasts, during which meat, dairy produce, rich oils and so on were eschewed. There are various individual feast days during the Orthodox calendar, upon which it would be unthinkable for a wedding to be celebrated. But more to the point there were two fasts of great length.
The first fast was the great or holy fast of the seven weeks of Lent. For instance, in the Serbian Orthodox calendar, traditionally the Church celebrated no marriages between Bele Poklade (a moveable feast, “white Shrovetide”, the last Sunday before Lent) and Đurđevdan (St George’s Day, 6th May).
The second fast took place over the 40 days leading up to Christmas. Again, for the Serbian Orthodox calendar, this is the Božićni Post period from 28th November up to Božić, the Orthodox Christmas itself, on 7th January.
Marriages therefore tended to cluster between these two extended feasts. Factoring in the principal months of agricultural activity, this produced a spate of weddings from mid-January to early March, and again from October to late November.
Of course, for other Orthodox societies, the harvest might move a few weeks according to latitude, altitude, climate and other factors. Similarly, fasting at Lent might well take place over fewer weeks. However, the pattern itself remains largely true and produces the same seasonal peaks in marriage.
The Ottomans conceptualised the population of their empire as three basic communities: the Muslims, the non-Muslim inhabitants and the foreigners (or Franks). In turn, the non-Muslims were divided by religion into the millets.
This view of the population informed the arrangements made to measure and monitor the people. Only Muslims could serve in the army. Their Christian and Jewish neighbours instead had to pay a kind of poll tax called the cizye or jizye, later replaced by the bedelât-ı askeriye, literally a tax in lieu of military service. The early 19th century Ottoman censuses were designed primarily to capture the necessary information to enable the state to conscript Muslim men into the army and to levy taxes upon the non-Muslims. Over the course of the century, the Ottomans endeavoured periodically to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their data, so as to boost army and reserve sizes and to maximise tax revenues.
Only males were counted in the census before reforms in 1878, as only males were liable to military service and taxation.
The Ottoman censuses were not defined regular (for instance, decennial) events taking place over a single night or weekend, unlike most of those in places like Britain and America. Rather, they tended to extend over two years and frequently longer. In due course, the census and civil registration functions merged into a single continuous ongoing recording of the population – the basis of this can be said to have been largely achieved by the mid- or late 1880s. This system was also joined up with the military, so that the army had a continuous feed of information for conscripting men into active service, the reserve and the local militia.
From the late 1850s, the census was also used to produce the equivalent of ID cards. The earliest of these was the vergi nüfus tezkeresi or population tax certificate issued to males, which recorded the holder’s obligations to the state, such as their tax liability.
From about 1878, this was replaced by nüfus tezkeresi or population certificate. This served for ID and had to be used in all interactions with the state and for travel purposes. The information on this population certificate was an extract from the sicil-ı nüfus, or nüfus defter, being the actual population registers created and maintained by the state. Muslims and non-Muslims were enumerated in separate registers. The registers included women for the first time. The register included name, age, place of birth, marital condition, religion, occupation, address and military status. Nickname and, in case of adult males, style of beard or moustache were also recorded for purposes of identification. Along side the population registers, a system of notifying and registering births, marriages, divorces, deaths and change of address was also implemented.
Between 1878 and 1885, the new system was gradually rolled out across much of the Empire. Provinces in Turkey-in-Europe which were not immediately covered included the vilayets of Kosovo, Monastir and Shkodër, plus Bosnia, Bulgaria, Crete, Cyprus, Hercegovina and the autonomous Eastern Rumelia. However, the Aegean, Constantinople, Danube, Edirne, Janina and Salonica provinces were covered, plus Ionia and all of western and central Asia Minor.
Finally, new regulations came into force between 1900 and 1902 that mandated the requirement to carry and present one’s population certificate. In due course, this was documenting so much information about the bearer that it became an ID booklet rather than card, known as the nüfus hüviyet cüzdanı or simply nüfus cüzdanı and still used in Turkey today.
Of course, an increasing numbers of Ottoman-born subjects of empire acquired, for protection or advantage, European passports. For instance, the Greek state was happy to assign Greek citizenship to all Greeks living beyond its borders who applied.
Cyprus, As I Saw It In 1879, by the Victorian engineer and adventurer Sir Samuel White Baker, is an important depiction of the condition of the island one year after British occupation. Baker, alternately mounted or on foot, with hunting dogs, the barely glimpsed Lady Baker and convenient quantities of retainers in tow, crossed Cyprus in all directions – from arrival at Larnaca, to Nicosia (Lefkosia), across the Mesaoria plains to Famagusta (Ammochostos), back up to Cape Apostolos Andreas on the point of the Karpasia peninsula, west along the northern coast to Kyrenia (Keryneia) and beyond to Morfou, then anti-clockwise round the coast via Paphos and Limasol to the cool of the mountain-top monastery of Trooditissa, where he wrote up his daily journal into a manuscript for his publishers back in England.
The book has all the strengths and flaws of a product of that class of Englishman, perhaps now extinct, possessed of unthinking self-belief, classical education, the practical application of common sense and a love of the great outdoors. His value judgements are confident and his manner usually patronising but he acknowledges both the good character of the Cypriots he encounters and the impoverished straits in which they find themselves. Refreshingly, he is not sparing in his criticism of the invidious deal that the British have struck with the Turks and the practical consequences of that deal both for the British and for the islanders.
The Convention of June 1878 effectively gave the British a conditional lease over Cyprus so long as the Russians continued to hold and occupy previously Ottoman districts of Ardahan, Batoum (today Batumi) and Kars. Should the Russians withdraw, so would the British. This meant that Cyprus was not part of the British Empire per se and would not be colonised; the uncertainty meant that the British government and British capital were disinclined to invest in what could prove to be but a temporary holding. The normal British instincts for improvement were therefore checked. Not only was Cyprus in dire need of investment, having been impoverished from its three centuries under the chronic mismanagement of the Turks, with their iniquitous system of tax-farming and extortion, but there was a double-bind: the British arrangement with the Ottomans included the ongoing payment of revenues from Cyprus to the Turks at the previous inflated levels. This meant that there was barely any surplus from which the British could fund the development of roads, forestry, irrigation and education as they would customarily wish. The result was disappointed Cypriots and slow progress.
Baker’s book describes the geography, geology, nature, agriculture and settlements along his route. He is not an anthropologist and his curiosity about the inhabitants is limited. Nevertheless, his book is recommended to any family historians with Cypriot roots who wish to understand the Cyprus known to their ancestors in the late 19th century. The book is out of copyright and now widely available through print-on-demand services.
There was much anxiety but no fighting as such in Cyprus during WW2. The Germans never invaded; the Italians bombed, but usually ineffectually. Various plans were put in place to evacuate civilians from the capital Nicosia in the event of enemy attack; the idea was that Cypriots should make for their family villages and keep their heads down for the duration. British dependents were in fact evacuated from Famagusta for Port Said, Egypt, along with some 500 Polish refugees, in June 1941.
Initially, the British had low expectations of the Cypriots as fighting men and thus patronisingly directed volunteers to the supply and transport companies. However, this attitude soon changed and the bravery of Cypriots acknowledged as they fought in France, Greece, Italy and North Africa. From February 1940, at least 20,000 men volunteered and were attested into the newly formed Cyprus Regiment. Cypriots were motivated by the perfectly reasonable hope of post-War enosis with Greece and also by simple economic reasons, the volunteers being paid two shillings per day (significantly more than the average wage at that time). Additionally, over 1,000 men were recruited into the Cyprus Volunteer Force to serve as the equivalent of the Home Guard on the island itself. Many more Cypriots – 20,000 men and women – laboured under the Public Works Department to construct defences on the island.
Inevitably, many Cypriots were killed during the War, a small number on the home front as a result of air raids but far greater numbers overseas. It is possible to search for individual casualties (including civilians) by name on the official Commonwealth War Graves Commission website. Alternatively, you can visit the Cyprus Veterans Association website, which has extracted from the CWGC database the list of Cypriot casualties. The Veterans website also carries a list of Cypriots decorated for bravery.
When the British occupied Cyprus in 1878, Nicosia was the only large town and the great majority of the island’s population resided in the 900 or so villages. Some Cypriot villages were solely Christian and some solely Muslim, but many were of mixed religion to a greater or lesser extent. Intermarriage took place between Turkish men and Christian women but generally Christian men were not permitted to take Muslim wives.
Some families, known as linobambaki or linobamvaki, or “flax and cottons”, had a kind of dual identity. Some of the early colonial British saw this simply and pejoratively as an expedient adaptation, a kind of shifting identity avowedly Christian and Muslim alternately, as it suited the linobambaki, for instance Christian to avoid military service and Muslim to avoid the military exemption tax. Indeed, they had a reputation among the British for either avoiding taxes or being perpetually in arrears. The linobambaki took names such as the local equivalents of Jacob and Joseph which could pass as Christian or Muslim, Greek or Turkish.
However, today the received opinion is that the linobambaki were crypto-Christians, who tried to conform outwardly to Islam while inwardly still observing the Christian faith. There are some persuasive arguments that the linobambaki tended to be Roman Catholic Franks or Latins, with distant Western European roots, or Maronites, rather than Greek Orthodox, although straightforward conversion to Islam did of course occur.
Everywhere in rural Cyprus, regardless of religion, marriage was contracted at a young age: it was quite common for a boy to marry at aged 15 years and his bride to be a girl of 12 years or younger. Divorce seems to have been a straightforward affair and neither infrequently sought nor socially unacceptable.
What appears somewhat unusual is the modest family size. Early British colonial administrators were surprised to find that married couples often had only one or two children (and suspected female infanticide). Having three or four children was considered a burden in the context of the rural poverty in which most families lived. The Ottoman state had collected a poll tax, called a verghi, on every male aged 15 years and older, as well as the tithe, a tax on livestock and, in the case of Christians, the exemption tax in lieu of army service. These charges upon essentially subsistence smallholders and peasants kept them poor and acted as a disincentive to large family size. This makes Cyprus quite a marked contrast to the rest of Turkey-in-Europe, where big peasant families were the norm despite the attentions of Ottoman tax collectors.
Britain relieved Ottoman Turkey of Cyprus during the gathering days of the late Victorian era, before the unthinkable possibility of imperial decline had occurred to anyone within the British elite.
In June 1878, a defensive alliance was struck between Britain and Turkey against Russia expansionist ambitions. In exchange for its protection, Britain occupied and administered Cyprus (with the proviso that it would withdraw from the island if Russia withdrew from Kars in Armenia). So in July 1878 the British sailed into Larnaca to assume its new responsibilities.
A habit of census-taking was well-established in Britain by this time, with the decennial censuses of the population informing and directing social policy and cultural debate – these are now very familiar to family historians with English, Welsh and Scottish ancestors, as those from 1841 to 1911 (or to 1901 in the case of Scotland) have been digitised and published online. So of course the British administration wanted immediately to get down to the serious business of counting and measuring and understanding its new subjects.
The Cyprus census returns of 1881, 1891 and 1901 show how small the population was: respectively, 186,173, 209,286 and 237,022 persons. The population was overwhelmingly rural too: the largest town, Nicosia, had only 11,536, 12,515 and 14,752 inhabitants in these three census years. As for religion, the population was majority Greek Orthodox: 73.9% in 1881, 75.8% in 1891 and 77.1% in 1901 (although the figures for Nicosia were markedly lower, being only 54.2% Orthodox in 1901). The great majority of the remainder of the population was of course Sunni Muslim.*
Registration of vital events also began to be placed upon a more sound footing from 1895. Births, marriages (from 1889) and deaths of British and other non-Ottoman subjects were registered by the Commissioners, being the chief British administrators of the six Districts of Famagusta (Ammochostos), Kyrenia, Larnaca, Limasol (Lemesós), Nicosia (Lefkosia) and Paphos. Births and deaths of Ottoman subjects (both Greek and Turkish Cypriot) were registered by the mukhtars (village heads). However, there was no official civil registration of non-British marriages until 1923.
The British also closed any overcrowded and/or unsanitary graveyards and opened new cemeteries away from human habitations.
They did all the other things that, for better or worse, usually accompanied British colonial rule in the late Victorian era – they tried to create more equitable taxation and a fairer judiciary; they started a programme of public works, laid roads, and modernised the harbour in Larnaca; they introduced a postal system, laid a telegraph cable to Egypt and opened a government savings bank. And of course the British rules of the road were enforced: drive on the left and overtake on the right, irrespective of whether you were driving a cart, riding a bicycle or leading a beast of burden.
There was of course no thought of political self-determination for the people of Cyprus, let alone enosis with Greece. However, the system imposed by the British seems, for its time and at that time, to have been more progressive than oppressive, even if it suffered from the under-funding and uncertainty which came from its unclear status before annexation in 1914.
For the family historian, too, the advent of British rule, with its censuses and civil registration, was probably a boon. The civil registers from 1895 onwards are held in the local register offices, while the censuses are in the custody of the State Archives but – it should be noted – do not list every member of the household as they do in Britain.
*The census counts are of course regarded as controversial by some, given the politicised history of modern Cyprus, but there seems no sound reason to doubt their basic accuracy. Contemporary commentators remarked upon the intelligence and co-operativeness of the Cypriots at census-taking and felt the census figures to be reliable and uncontentious. As well as Orthodox and Muslim, there were also minority communities of Maronites and Armenian Apostolic Christians on Cyprus.