Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

In search of ancestral roots

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was a keen observer and admirer of nature. As a child, he believed in an anecdote that there was a magical tree stump hidden in the forest near his village. It was this search that eventually initiated young Tolstoy into the world of letters.

Now the Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) is hoping to trigger this latent curiosity in children through a ‘Journey in quest of history’ project.

The programme implemented in association with the Department of Education urges them to trace the origin of their family name and prepare a profile on the oldest surviving member of the family.

“Family names and titles of traditional ancestral homes are familiar to most of the people here. Historians consider this unique to the State’s social and cultural history,” said P.J. Cherian, director, KCHR.

For instance, the roots of some of the family names and ancestral titles can be traced to the peculiarities of the environment in which they were situated, the vocation of the family members and even to the warmth of relationship that the members shared with one another, he said.

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