Anyways wish you luck with your Visa! May be some time in future we meet.

Sree/Rama

Coming from a syrian Christian family, I can remember how my interst to trace back my ancestors, starting from the immediate, someday was sparked. I had an elderly gentleman from our church telling that our forefathers were syrian settlers hundreds of years ago. This makes us jewish and hindu tradition following christians!! I had never thought that it could be historically so complicated! This could lead to so much of history finding too as we move further and further behind in the family tree.

I wonder how many I could trace back in my family. Living outside kerala and visiting the place for short terms, keeping track of names of a ‘little’ distant relatives can be a JOB! haha. Moreover, like you said, I don’t know how many of my grand aunts/ uncles might be even having track of their elder relatives. This should also inspire us for family gatherings liek the ones you have in your mom’s family. It keeps the family closely knit and the link alive. No matter where in the world you might be, to gather together will show the importance of each individal in that family.

Tremendous effort dear! Now you have me also to help you in this.

Infact, I got a link to your site from one of Youth Namboothiri Yahoo Group member only. What is surprising me is that you are well informed about these Namboothiri Yahoo groups!

Cheers
Sarman

Yes, that is one of the reason i put the reply here itself instead of emailing you. It will help bringing any more people interested or willing to share info. On my mother’s side we have a family history/tree book which I unfortunately didn’t bring over here. May be some info could be gathered from it if they’ve mentioned any conversion in it. Anyways I would be able to add a lot of records from it once i get it.

About Namboothiri families, there’re a few yahoo groups out there with a lot of members. Have you joined any of them? It must be helpful.
http://ca.groups.yahoo.com/group/namboothiri/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/youthnambudiri/

I’ll also search on conversion histories and notify on any interesting factors. I wish i was in India now as i can do a lot of things from there. Hopefully in an year my PhD will get over and i will be a free (?) bird.

I am too interested in your Family Trees because many Christian families especially in Kottayam area are (or that is what I have understood) descendants of Namboothiry families. So far I haven’t got any direct proof from our side to substantiate those claims. As I said earlier we don’t have any written records. So I am interested to know more about those families who have got converted from Namboothiry families, circumstances of those conversions and their past histories and current whereabouts. Hope our constant and continuous reaction may lead to clues about such families and hence hetherto unknown side of human conversions.

Hope to keep the interaction alive.

Sarman

The TNG scripts I’m using is available at a low cost of 29$. It is WORTH more than the price. There’re too many facilities over there which you’ll come to know once you use it. Since your GED file is large, what you can do here is:
1. FTP the GED file to a folder on your server
2. From the TNG scripts, update the data from the above GED file.

Yes, it can handle voluminous data. There’re users with more than 100,000 records. Their service is also great. The s/w is available at http://lythgoes.net/genealogy/software.php You can also look there for other users who’re using TNG. Demo is also available.

Note: Family Tree Maker has a bit of conflict with TNG as the ID it gives for the first 100 records are like I001 to I099 whereas ideally it should be I1 to I99. Hence I had to shift to PAF and use that GED for the website.

phpgedview at http://phpgedview.sourceforge.net/ is a free opensource similar to TNG but i wont recommend it. doesn’t come any near to TNG.

Anyways Sarman, am excited after learning your genealogy research based on Kerala Namboothiri families. I think we should keep in touch and exchange view/info so that we can better our genealogical research.

Cheers, Roxy

I am a Mumbai based Software Professional (42 Years) and I am doing Family Tree Research for last 5 years. I am using Family Tree maker Ver.11.00 and my database has got around 45,000 records and Roots of about 600 Namboothiri families. In some family I could go upto 10-12 generations.

Namboothiri community in Kerala doesn’t have more than 50000 members. (This is my version and our Community organaisations haven’t accepted this os far.) As it is a small community, all the records in my database are of relatives (distant also) only. As you said in your preface, when I found out the “relative ignorance” of our own cousins prompted my to launch a data collection meeting aged people. In Christian community (I think) you can refer to Church records where as we doesn’t have any such written records. The words and stories narrated by aged members of our community was the only the resource.

I have tried to download the same to NET but could not succeed because of the size of my database The GED file more than 8MB and the propreitory database of Family Tree maker (where my data is stored) is more than 21MB in size. Freequent upload is impossible to the size factor.

I found the software used by you is interesting and I was looking for something similar. Can you please help me by providng details about the above software? Can it handle voluminous data? etc etc….

Regards
Sarman

$lian, hehe. yeah itz great to go thru those interesting dramas. i have noted down some of them also ;), before everything fades to limbo.

$neethu & $litty, happy to see you guys here hope everything works out well for the benefit of all.