When Georgia Keilman was a teenager, she, like most others her age, had little interest in the nuances of her heritage. The granddaughter of four Greek immigrants from the Peloponnese who settled in the US in the early 1900s, and as a second-generation Greek American raised in the suburbs of Chicago, the only real connection she had with her Greek roots was through the local Orthodox Church, and the privilege of being raised with both sets of grandparents in her life. Looking back she carries regrets that are all too familiar: “I could kick myself; why didn’t I ask them questions?,” she says.
It was only once her yiayiades and pappoudes had passed on, that Georgia says the desire to learn more about their lives, and perhaps as a result, herself, developed.

“Once you’ve lost that connection, all of a sudden you realise you’ve lost it and then how do you reconnect? What was it like for them to grow up? Some of them lived in Greece during the wars; what did they go through? It’s just the little stories that you don’t even know,” Georgia explains.

As a result, she went on to become the founder of the Hellenic Genealogy Geek blog, and companion Facebook group, which today boasts over 16,000 members around the world.

Her own search to find out more about her familial roots started in her 30s. With a marketing background, and an interest in research of all kinds, she decided to start interviewing her living relatives about anything they might know, but says she quickly hit a dead end.

“My father and his brothers, they really didn’t know hardly anything about the family in Greece. For some reason their parents never really communicated that much about it. So when I would ask questions – ‘what was their childhood like?’ – they knew nothing. They would say ‘my parents never talked about it’ and so that was very frustrating,” Georgia recalls, and has since discovered many other Greeks across the diaspora are in the same boat. When I suggest that perhaps they are trying to cover up some dark family history, she has a chuckle.
“I don’t think so. I find just about everybody says the exact same thing,” she says.

“I think a lot of it has to do with [the fact that] in Greece a lot of people that grew up in the villages, the families have been in those villages forever, they kind of already know [the history] and so they just don’t have any interest in documenting it.”

At the time there was very little documentation available to her, given that most US records were only available on microfilm and those from Greece were very difficult to locate.

In 1996, when she decided to take a job offer in Australia, her personal search gained momentum, and evolved into something greater.

“Before I got there I didn’t know all that much about Australia. I knew that there were Greeks there; I had just a very cursory idea of what was going on. But then I spent a lot of time in bookstores, and I would see these books in the library, a lot of books that were written by immigrants or about the immigrants – and you would never see that here [in the US],” she explains.

Among the personal narratives she found a number of names and decided to start collecting the books and record all the names and personal information she found, which she would years later come to share on the Hellenic Genealogy Geek blog in a bid to assist others. And as her search continued, she was amazed at what she found.

“First of all, we were always told, my aunts and uncles would say, ‘there are no records available in Greece; they were all burned during the war’. And then we found that there were plenty of records available, and that is what really opened up things,” she says.

While she didn’t grow up speaking much Greek, a common occurrence with the Greeks who migrated to the US seeking to assimilate, a two-year stint working in Greece helped her develop her Greek language skills to the point where she felt comfortable translating simple documents such as electoral rolls.

While Georgia well and truly set the ball rolling, it was the community she started online in 2009 that has helped inject even more life into the project.

“On Facebook what happened was we had a lot of people from Greece joining and they were really helping anybody that needed information or wanted to understand things, or translating documents, and so the best thing about this community is the fact that so many people are engaged,” she says, with some posts reaching well over 100 responses.

In fact Georgia herself has made some dear friends in the group who have helped her in her own search, which has now seen her trace her family back to the 1800s.

“People find this to be amazing, but actually the records are quite accessible,” she says.

“One of the members of the group will email me and say ‘oh my God, I just found part of your family!’ and she’ll send me a copy of the record. I’m not sure my brothers are as excited about this as I am but, maybe their children will be,” she laughs.

Over the years she has pulled her research together, and that of others in the group, and has created a free downloadable PDF of resources titled ‘Version 2 – 1,870 Resources for Hellenic Genealogy Research’, which is just about to be updated to have 2,500 links to help people in their searches.

It features categories including Adoption/Orphans, Asia Minor/Pontos/Anatolia/Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Cemetery/Funerals/Obituaries, Election Material – Translations of General Election Lists (Greek to English), Immigration, Passenger Lists, and Wars/Military to name a few.

“People are amazed at some of the records that are available,” Georgia says.

“We’ve had many members who were orphans, who are searching for the family, who during the war were just dropped off at an orphanage and adopted, they have no idea who their parents are. There are many of those and they are looking for help to connect.”

Meanwhile for those whose last names may have been changed along the way, she says there are often documents that can be tracked down.

“I could assume that in Australia some of this is same, but in the US when you get naturalised it’ll say on your papers that your original name was this, or there’s always documents that will help you get a clue as to what’s going on. Or, if you have a clue of the region you came from, what you got is a truncated version of the name,” she explains.

Georgia says that as time goes on, what may have seemed like an impossible task given turbulent historical times, mass movements of people, and growing language barriers, is becoming easier thanks to the internet, and also goes for people who have their origins in regions such as Asia Minor that were largely occupied by Greeks before the population exchange of 1922.

“More and more information is going online because there are groups that do research – there’s a lot of research in those areas, and they do share it. There are so many people that came from that area that it really helps to reach out and look at these different organisations which can help you,” she says.

“The other thing is, there are books now out of print that list people that died in those areas or some of the atrocities that happened and list the names. They’re available online. They might be in Greek or they might be in Turkish, but they’re out there. Also the historians from the local area have self-published books, so a lot of the time in some of the libraries they have a lot of books on different regions. So there are things available, you just have to be willing to search.”

Aside from going through online resources and documents, the popularity of ancestry DNA tests is on the rise with a number of companies offering a chance to get to better know your make-up. While some are excited, others are concerned about their privacy, and what their DNA in the wrong hands could mean. But for Georgia it has only complemented her search for answers.

“I have done it, my mother has done it, I had my brother do it; I find that it has helped me connect with relatives and some of them are third cousins that I didn’t even know I had. Now I knew of that part of the family, but I didn’t know these people. I didn’t even know what their names were, so it’s really interesting to connect and be able to get another feel for what’s been going on. It’s exciting, and we have such a large group now that they actually will help you understand what these tests say.”

For Georgia what started out as a hobby has turned into what can only be described as a project from the heart, and one that has seen her track not only her own personal family history, but to help so many others with theirs, and you can hear it in her voice; it really means the world.

“This is going to sound a little silly, but actually, I’m divorced and I don’t have children, and I think to myself ‘okay, this is something I can leave [behind]; this is what I’ve done to change things’. And the more I can get out there, the more I will have accomplished and make it easier for people to do this. I feel like I’m driven to do it now.”

To do your own research head to the Hellenic Genealogy Geek blog at http://hellenicgenealogygeek.blogspot.com/ and the companion Hellenic Genealogy Geek Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/118224528189671/