The Kaghakatzi Family Tree project database has broken through the 3,000 mark now, thanks to the efforts of LA based community leader Hagop Hagopian who secured further genealogical details from members of two large clans, the Nercessians and the Kaplanians, thus helping fill in a large number of gaps. We have also been working on eliminating duplications.
The database has been converted into a new, uptodate PDF file which can be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader (it is free and can be downloaded from the Adobe website, www.adobe.com/products/adobe). Our preferred version is 8.
We've had some problems with the genealogy creating software, Family Tree Maker, running on Vista. When we tried to convert the database to a PDF format, Vista presented us with a mammoth 190 MB file! No matter what we tried (and we scoured the Internet for a solution), we could not compress the file to anything less than 30 or 40 MB. The only solution was to go back to Windows XP and try the conversion there.
It worked! The result was a streamlined 928 KB PDF file, easy on the eye and the computer resources.
The Aghajanian clan is one of several sadly under represented in the Kaghakatzi family database.
We recently received some genealogical information about them that filled in many of the gaps, but unfortunately something happened in transit and we lost the file sent to us, along with the email address of the sender, Justine (Aghajanian).
We are now desperately trying to make amends and would appreciate any help in this regard.
A few
weeks ago, visitors to the Kaghakatzi Family Tree Project website reported
they could not access the site, and that every time they tried, they received
a warning about the site being infected by a virus or trojan.
But it was neither a virus nor a trojan but a hack attack.
The threat was promptly removed by our quick acting internet service provider
(ISP).
No one, absolutely no one, is immune to such attacks. They
are an occupational hazard. If you have a website, then you can expect the
sharks to be circling around it.
Take the case of the respected European website that has
been in the news recently. It seems a hacker succeeded in bypassing its
firewalls and posting a hundred child porn photographs onsite, the children
ranging in age from babies to 18-year-olds. Within hours, the site had received
millions of hits.
The outrage triggered a worldwide police hunt. In Australia
alone, our meritorious federal police identified over 2800 computers that
had downloaded the pictures. (Although, they aver, some people could have
accessed the site by mistake).
In Kaghakatzi culture, as in many others particularly in
the Middle East, we venerate and idolize children. One poet says, "they
are our heart, walking on the ground." And Gibran Khalil Gibran reminds
us that our children are not our children, "they are the sons and daughters
of Life's longing for itself."
"I fear for my child lest the wind hurt it," is a common
saying among the Kaghakatzis.
To sexually abuse a child is the most heinous, unspeakable
and unforgivable crime in our lexicon. We may not spare a child the rod
as we discipline it, and we may often express our affection and compassion
for a child in what the West would construe as an intrusive or aggressive
physical manner, but to subject the child to that type of horrendous pedophilic
indignity so common, alas, in other, presumably developed cultures, is the
abomination of desolation.
Studies
(click here for details and associated
article) show the plague is
spreading and growing exponentially. Even as the courts prepare to lay charges,
we all know that will not stem the wild tide.
We applaud the endeavors of our overworked and over-stressed
law-enforcement authorities as they crack down on the criminals. Perhaps,
we can find ways to help.
Particularly pernicious are the deceptive child model websites
that purport to promote your child as a future supermodel. Most of these
are nothing but pedophilic libraries, housing pictures of innocent children
in suggestive poses. For legal reasons, we cannot list these websites but
it is clear the children are made to peddle, albeit unwittingly, nothing
but softcore porn.
Guard your children with your life. They are more precious.
The Convent or Patriarchate of St James, which would be the official repository of all records pertaining to the Armenian presence in the Holy Land, does possess some documentary evidence of the uninterrupted occupancy of the Armenian Quarter by Kaghakatzis, in the form of registers of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths, but we have now discovered that these date back no earlier than about 1840.
Apparently, there are no files predating that. Or no files have been uncovered yet that predate that.
It is quite possible that somewhere in the labyrinthine confines of the Patriarchate archives, there do exist earlier registers, but launching a discovery of these would, conceivably, be a herculean task.
Perhaps, at some point in the future, some researcher might devote a few years of his/her time to such a labor of love. For the moment, we have to be content with the cutoff date of 1840.
In the meantime, we await word from Jerusalem's Photo Garo about progress in photographing the available registers.