Please Help Us Preserve Our Karytaina Heritage

Happy New Year 2025 from Mary LaViolette (Nicolopoulou) and Dena Palamedes. As many of you know, from Karytaina Arts Festivals, we have undertaken a voluntary effort called Karytaina Ancestry, where we are recording and preserving the genealogical history of Karytaina.

We are asking for your help preserving fragile and difficult to read old contracts, documents and photos in your possession which are an important part of the history of Karytaina.

In Greece, all legal transactions are recorded by notary offices (Symvolaiografeia). Notaries kept records such as marriage and dowry contracts (proikosmyfona), wills (diathikes), land transfer contracts, and business records. A copy was given to each of the parties in the contract.

These Notary records contain useful information linking families, proving relationships, and providing some marriage and death information before church and municipal records were available.

For example, we have in our possession many old documents which John Nicolopoulos saved from his grandfather’s dilapidated notary office in Karytaina. We scanned them and, in order to better preserve the originals, we placed them in special acid-free cardboard boxes destined for the future museum of Karytaina.

Together with Gregory Kontos of GreekAncestry.net, we are in the process of indexing these documents so that we know when each was written and who were the parties to the contract.

In early February we will be able to scan old documents and books with the help of Dena Palamedes who will visit Greece and will bring with her a portable scanner.

Those of you who have old documents and who agree to have them scanned, please notify Mary at 6931514133 or at mary.laviolette@outlook.com. Your old documents can also be handed to Mary at the pita-cutting in Athens on the 26th of January or in Karytaina on the 18th of January or you can leave them with Viki at Vrenthi.

Please place them in an envelope or box with your name, phone number and address and we will return them to you in person. Also, please provide an email address where you want the scanned document(s) sent. If you know any details, please write them on a separate paper for each one – for example, type (dowry agreement or land contract), date, names mentioned.

Finally, if you wish, you can leave us your old documents to be kept with the other old documents already in our possession.

The Karytaina family tree, called the Karytaina Village Project is on the Ancestry.com website and can be viewed by opening a free account with them. The tree, with already over 9,000 people, is only half finished and will grow more as Mary continues to upload data from the Karytaina records.

We ask for your help adding information about descendants who were born or lived outside of Karytaina – in Athens, in the rest of Greece and abroad. We would like to receive by email a few family photos so that we can upload a good profile photo for each person. (We already have the old photos from the Photo Exhibit).

To better communicate with our English-speaking cousins, last year we created the Karytaina Ancestry Facebook group and it has slowly grown to 100 members. Please share this with your relatives who live abroad as many have not been invited because we do not know who they are.