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Documentation
Documenting any family history can be a daunting and difficult task. In the case of our family there are added difficulties because we have no surviving records prior to 1894.
By Gregory C. Emmanuel
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Emmanuel : Introduction : Documentation
As far as we know the oldest surviving record of our family is a photo of Grandfather Gregory's graduating class at the Grand National Academy in Constantinople, in 1894. Although our family has been traced back to 1804 we have no official records or other documents for the period from 1804 to 1894. The information we have about that period is based on the recollections of Grandfather Gregory's children. His son, Dimitri G. Emmanuel, wrote down a lot of the things he was told and created the first Emmanuel family tree in the 1980s.
Grandfather Gregory and his forefathers came from the islands of Moskhonisia and Tenedos. Although Greek in nature, language and culture, in the 19th century these islands belonged to the Ottoman Empire, which was notorious for its inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy. If written records were maintained during that time, they would have been written in the old form of the Turkish language and in Arabic script and translating them today would be a serious undertaking.
The collapse of the Ottomans was followed by the emergence of modern Turkey in 1923, when a great many official Ottoman records were destroyed. Also, in that year Moskhonisia and Tenedos were formally ceded to Turkey through the Treaty of Lausane, so whatever cultural autonomy those islands enjoyed was ended and the Greek institutions were shut down. In addition, the various anti-Greek pogroms of the 1950s and 1960s resulted in the destruction of many Greek institutions (e.g., schools, churches) and very likely any remaining records were destroyed.
However, it is possible that some records survive, stored at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople (Istanbul), at the main Greek Orthodox church of Agia Paraskevi on Tenedos itself, or in private hands. |
