George Aghjayan
On Feb. 9, reports surfaced that over four million Turkish citizens
had attempted to access the online government system (known as “e-Devlet”)
seeking access to their family tree. Regardless of whether the figure
is accurate, it is clear that the high volume of traffic to the website
at first slowed and ultimately forced the shutdown of the system, which
had only recently been opened.
The reason for the extraordinary interest in these family tree
reports was the claim that they contained much more information than
previously available—information dating back as the early 1800s in some
cases. In addition, this was the first time such information was so
easily accessible online from anywhere in the world. The internet soon
filled with stories of Turkish citizens learning of Armenian and other
ancestry they had not known about previously.
The system remained closed for approximately a week, during which a
message on the website indicated improvements were being implemented to
handle the traffic. Now open again, a new process and daily limits have
been employed to maintain the functioning of the website. Since the
system has reopened, it is also being reported that 8 million Turkish
citizens (about 10 percent of the population) have requested the new
pedigree table. However, many questions remain regarding exactly what
information is available, the implications for those with Armenian
ancestry and, more broadly, all Turkish citizens today.
I have reviewed a very limited sample of the new “Alt ÜSt Soy Belgesi̇” (referred hereafter as NEW) as well as the previously available “Nüfus Kayıt Örneği”
(referred to hereafter as OLD), in some cases for the same people.
While the sampling is small, some patterns have emerged. I have
attempted to reverse engineer the process used to create such documents
based on a small sample as well as a limited knowledge of the sources
that would have been used as inputs to that process.
NEW Versus OLD
The OLD reports I have seen only supplied information on people who
attained an identification number issued during the post-1923 modern
Republican period of Turkey. The person’s name, surname, parents’ names
and dates of birth and death were listed. The religious affiliation was
also indicated as well as the date of conversion when the affiliation
changed.
The dates from early records were converted to the modern calendar.
In many cases, early deaths are missing exact dates. There is also a
date of registration. In some cases, the date is missing while in others
it is many years after the date of birth.
The NEW report does not include a person’s identification number nor a
date of registration. The NEW report traces all known ancestors of a
single person. Each person is listed with surname and parents’ names,
date and place of birth, marital status and date of death. There is a
specific reference to address though no indication for the time period
the address was in use. There are no explanatory footnotes to the
report.
Observations
I have not seen any examples where the date of death was shown to be prior to 1905.
The one example of conversion to Islam took place during the
Republican period (post-1923). This person was born prior to 1915 yet
not registered until the Republican period.
The names shown for those known to have converted during the genocide
are the Muslim names. However, the Christian names of their parents are
shown.
There are examples of known Armenian ancestors listed as Muslim
without any reference to their Armenian origins. In addition, those with
very close DNA matches to Armenians have only Muslim names in their
report even in cases where oral tradition supports the Armenian ancestry
of the family.
I have seen at least one example where known ancestors alive during
the Republican period are not connected to their descendants’ reports.
This is hard to explain as anything but a clerical error.
Results vary significantly and the variation would seem to be mostly
correlated to the number of ancestors alive at the time the 1905 Ottoman
registration system was initiated. However, at least some of the
results I have seen indicate the link to the Ottoman registration was
not possible. In my own family, this is the case as no additional
information is available for my great-great grandparents, even though
they were alive in 1908 as indicated by the report of one of their
daughters.
One item that has confused some people is the common occurrence of
dates shown as 01/07/YYYY. I have seen at least a few people view this
as indicative of the arbitrariness of dates in general. However, my view
is simply that the exact date was not known or recorded (e.g. when only
age is recorded) and, thus, July 1 was chosen as the mid-point of the
calendar year. This is a common practice in demography.
Conclusions
It is outside the scope of this article to detail the complete
history of population registration from Ottoman to Republican Turkey.
However, it is important to understand the foundations of the current
system in order to help explain the NEW reports.
Over the past decade, Turkey has moved to an address based electronic
identification system for its citizens. The unique identification
number is meant to serve as a link among numerous government information
systems. In theory, the new system is linked to the family registration
files. Thus, the OLD and NEW reports display the information contained
in the family registration files.
For the Republican period, the family registration file should be
complete yet the potentially significant gap between birth and
registration could lead to complications. In addition, errors could be
introduced during the conversion from paper to electronic systems. The
real question though is how the link was made to Ottoman era
information.
I have viewed examples of the late Ottoman registration system begun
in 1905 for Palestine. There were preliminary and basic registers as
well as registers for specific vital events (e.g. divorce, death,
migration, etc.). Having worked with this data, I view it as near
impossible to link specific people on a universal scale without a unique
identification number. Such linkage requires a person registered
properly during the Ottoman period, lived into the republican period and
was issued a unique identification number.
It is rare for an Armenian to meet all three requirements. It is
commonly accepted that women and children were under-registered in the
Ottoman Empire (and even into the Republican period). Yet this is the
demographic that most often survived the genocide and remained in
Turkey. Thus far, the evidence seems to also indicate that those who
converted to Islam prior to the genocide would not receive information
on their original Christian names. Throughout the 1800s and even
earlier, many thousands of Armenians were coerced into converting—the
reasons too numerous to list here. The Armenians with Turkish
citizenship and pre-genocide origins in Istanbul would seem to be the
most likely to gain insights from the NEW reports.
There are other issues specific to surnames and methods of identification.
(For a more detailed example of the
methods used to link families across multiple source records and the
complexities specific to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, please refer
to Aghjayan’s in-depth article for Houshamadyan.)
The opening of information contained in the family registration files
is welcome, particularly as it relates to its foundational data from
the late Ottoman period. As such, there is no longer any reason to block
access to the census registers from the last years of the Ottoman
Empire.
Currently, researchers are only allowed access to census registers
that date to prior to 1850 and the regions where Armenians predominantly
lived are underrepresented in availability.
My hope is that the Turkish government will now make accessible the
population registers from the early 1900s to all researchers.
"The Armenian Weekly," February 23, 2018
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