2024 has been an amazing year for our Kytherian Genealogy Project. It has been our most successful yet. We have added thousands of sources to our references and compiled dozens of family trees for Kytherians all over the world. This year we also added quirky and useful merchandise to our website.
The highlight of the year was the honour of being asked to raise a flag at the grave at Brighton Cemetery of Constantine Aroney, the only Kytherian dual Anzac. It was such an emotional experience and one we will both remember for many years to come. This was so touching that it inspired us to start our own Kytherian Memorial Day in which we will honour ten or so Kytherians twice a year who never married and/or never had children so that their memory may stay alive for generations to come. The first one was commemorated in October this year. You can read about these Kytherian men and women in our booklet available here. We are already planning our second memorial day for April 2025.
A major highlight was Kalie graduating from the University of New England with a Bachelor of Historical Inquiry and Practice in May. In 2025 Kalie will bring this new knowledge to her Kytherian Genealogy Project work with her blogs and research.
Amalia went to Kythera in July and August. As usual, she purchased new books about Kytherian family history to add to our extensive family history library which now contains 108 Kytherian family history books and is probably the largest library of its kind in the world.
Also, in her travels on the island she found a few graves in churches and unusual locations that she missed in 2022 when she endeavoured to photograph every grave in every cemetery in Kythera. She even found a very small cemetery she missed before. These were added to the resources page on our website.
While in Kythera she met with the deputy mayor and Renata from the archives on multiple occasions so that we can both continue our strong relationship with Kythera, and we can continue to work together for our common goals. Amalia also met the wonderful president of the Kytherian Association of Athens, Vaso Samiou, and hopefully we can work together in the future.
Hopefully 2025 will see both Amalia and Kalie in Kythera at the same time. Image what we can do together!!
In 2024 we literally added tens of thousands of pieces of information for Kytherian family researchers from all over the world to access for free. A huge and important project that we worked on for over six years was finally added. These were the translations and transcriptions of all the surviving church registers from Kythera dating from the late 1600s to 1865. Although the original pages are available online, the sheer volume as well as the old Greek handwriting made it nearly impossible for people to trace their ancestors through these records. So, we systematically went through each and every page of these records, translated and transcribed information from these and created our new databases, which makes finding information from these documents as simple as a database search on our website, with links to each original digitised document for reference.
The church records and the continual updating of the newspaper social news databases has seen the number of citations available on our resources page at just under 70,000! Amazing! In 2025 Amalia will continue reading the Kytherian newspapers and adding to her social news databases while Kalie will continue the gruelling and difficult task of reading the last few church registers that are not online yet. Our resources will continue to grow month after month, year after year.
The most exciting part of 2024 for us was the creation of our shop and the introduction of Kytherian Genealogy Project merchandise. We are amazed at the response we have had. Fridge magnets have proven to be more popular than anticipated and as a result we had to keep expanding the range of villages available. We are now up to 42 different places. Our tote bags are also very popular. We hope our range will grow in 2025.
Our main Project is coming along very well. Between documents, newspapers and contributions from fellow Kytherians around the world we now have images of over 3170 people born on Kythera more than 100 years ago. That number is well above our expectations already and we hope to get to 3500 before the end of 2025. We also have over 70,400 Kytherians in our files born as early as the very late 1500s up to the end of December 2024. In 2025 we will be adding the 1925 births per month, so the number of people in our files are also growing all the time.
The first Wednesday of every month of 2024 at 6am we published a new blog. We had some very interesting blogs this year ranging from unusual Kytherian deaths to Kytherians and their presence in NSW country towns, to interesting people and advice on family history research. We even wrote blogs on the different paximadia (olive oil rusks) available in Kythera and tickets to the Kytherian Association of Baltimore balls. In 2025 we will continue our regular blogs with more places and the Kytherian presence, more unusual deaths, more stories of individuals and who knows, maybe we might even rewrite some Kytherian history as we did in 2023 with the discovery of the true first Kytherian to come to Australia. That is the great thing about research: we do not know what we may find until we find it.
We compiled dozens of family trees for people of Kytherian descent from all over the world in 2024. Our work is in family homes in California, Texas, the United Kingdom, Australia, Kythera and elsewhere. We even helped people from Argentina and Dublin with their own research. We are keeping Kytherians from all over the world connected through our research. We are truly international.
Thanks to our contributors and those that interact and comment on our work and social media posts. We believe we have a close community that we love and hope it continues to grow.
We both wish you all a very happy and healthy 2025 and may it be full of friends, family and people you love.
Amalia and Kalie
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