DNA Daily News & Analysis, India
June 22 2013
Documenting an Armenian heritage
Saturday, Jun 22, 2013, 19:02 IST | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA
A British born researcher is actively working to preserve photographic
evidence of every birth, marriage and death of the Armenian community
in India, a process which if done earlier would’ve helped Prince
William find his Armenian roots.
Liz Chater was born in the UK. When the news broke that Lady came from
a family that could be traced back to Armenian ancestors in India, she
was bombarded with queries from interested people interested in
finding the family’s graves. Chater, after all, is quite the expert on
Armenians in India. This family history researcher specialises in
Armenians in India and the Far East and is dedicated to Armenian
family history in India (1600-1950).
Her interest is tracing her family stems from not knowing anything
about its origins – she knew about her mother’s side (who is Welsh)
but Liz’s father, who died in 1983, never talked about his family back
in Kolkata. `My search took me to the British Library in London where
on my first visit, I was lucky enough to be able to trace many members
of my father’s side of the family. I posted some queries to a
genealogy mailing list and an Armenian researcher called Nadia Wright,
who specialises in Armenians in Singapore and Malaysia, told me the
names were Armenian. This was the first I knew that I had Armenian
ancestors in my family,” she says.
Having discovered her Armenian heritage, she started looking for
information. “There was very little, if any, information on the
internet. Wanting to help others with their own Armenian family
history in India I started a small website and with each new piece of
information or discovery, I added it on,” she adds.
In 2005, she made her first trip to Kolkata where she visited the
church and the graves. She then started photographing graves and in
the evenings would transcribe them and upload it on her website. “It
was an immediate hit.” By the end of her trip, she had taken over
3000 photographs of graves and church registers with a view to
transcribing them. After six months, she found an Armenian doctor
willing to translate the registers. At the end of 2007 The Families in
British India Society had placed the whole of the
Armenian Church baptism register (1793-1859) of the Holy Nazareth
Church Kolkata on their website. This was the first time that it had
been translated from Armenian into English.
“By 2007, I had decided that I wanted to start a project `Armenian
Graves in India’ and I travelled to India and photographed the whole
of the churchyards at the Holy Nazareth Church, St. Gregory’s, and
Tangra respectively. In 2008 I completed Chinsurah, Saidabad, and
Chennai (Madras) respectively and along the way donations of
photographs of graves in Agra , Mumbai (Bombay) and Surat have helped
to continue my Armenian history in India project,” she says.
Many of the graves in Chater’s collection have dual inscriptions in
Armenian and English. But Chater still has some 3,000 photographs of
Armenian graves whose inscriptions are written only in Armenian that
she hasn’t been able to translate yet. For this she is relying on the
Armenian community to help her.
Chater’s work can be viewed on website