Genealogy and Public History at the Foundation of the Hellenic World - Michael Warlas
The Foundation of the Hellenic World is an institution that addresses to the wide public. This means that through its work it attempts to embrace all age groups and to address to all the social and educational groups of the population. The main objective of the Genealogy Department is initially to strengthen the historical memory of all Greeks through the examination of their personal and family history. Everybody can participate in our activity, irrespective of their origin and whether they are famous or not, that is why it is a programme that is carried out in cooperation with the public.
In order to organize better our work, we have divided our activity into three programmes. Two of them have been developing since 1996/7 while the third for the two last years. Our first programme is the Genealogy programme that refers mainly to the families of refugees from Asia Minor, Pontos, Eastern Thrace, principally from 1914 to 1925. In cooperation with their families, the Municipalities and refugees' associations, we collect the data and we organize them into a large database that presently includes more than 110,000 people.
Our second programme "Asia Minor Refugees Testimonies" includes interviews and written autobiographies from the last generation of refugees, who arrived in Greece while children or teenagers. Most of the interviews are recorded in BETA video, which is the basic TV format, and in DVD, the most practical format, where one can record an interview even with his personal video camera. Some autobiographies are recorded in both analogic and digital format, while we have received some in writing, something that preserves the handwriting, the style and the spelling of the original writing.
Regarding our last programme, "My History", we ask from the participants to give us or send us photographs, documents and objects, which we store as digital images together with the comments and information provided by their owners. In the future, "amateur" historians themselves will be able to present a small research plan using the photographs, texts and, why not, the sounds that they will have recorded and submitted to the programme.
All this data are unified and jointly organized thanks to digitization, which is a process during which information, from whatever source, is conveyed in digital format, as it appears in the transparency.
Our programmes are not just digitization programmes, but to a large extend are conducted and supported digitally through the web pages of this and other FHW programmes and are presented digitally on the Internet, through the Mass Media or through gatherings organized by the department with the assistance of other FHW departments.
Through our web pages you can send us an e-mail using the special forms, download the special questionnaires and submit your answer to the programme's questions. Your registration to a special genealogy programme allows us to organize the data on family and personal basis and to depict them in special charts, the geneograms, which appear on web pages that are created automatically by the genealogy software or on special forms concerning the history of each family, with biographical data about each member, statistics etc.
Any class, any school or simply any group of friends can constitute a small genealogic community and use genealogy software in order to organize the data collected through special forms or questionnaires. Digital photographs may be added and the results will be presented on the web pages that are created by the programme that will be renewed regularly. Depending on the resulting data, each group can also organize small interview projects, collect photographs with themes relevant to the history of their neighborhood or their city or dealing with their parents' and grandparents' memories from the time of the war or their immigration to the city where they live now. If we can do this for each one of the schools participating in the programme, we will create an international research programme that may demonstrate the fact that we have a lot to share from our recent history.