Upon returning from her Ithacan holidays last year, Vicky Kapourelakos showed her mother a document “that brought her to tears”.

It was the birth certificate of her mum’s brother who had died shortly after birth.

“I felt very bad, actually, because it brought up some tragic moments for her,” Kapourelakos tells Neos Kosmos.

But she concedes the discovery made the family story more complete.

“Mum has often spoken to me about how she grew up in a very loving family, despite the difficulties.

“But, of course, there’s always tragedy in those times, and a lot of it is around births and illness.”

Kapourelakos’ parents had migrated to Australia in the ’60s, her late father from Kefalonia and mother from Ithaca.

The desire to learn about her heritage, saw her becoming involved with Melbourne’s Ithacan Philanthropic Society.

“Only in the last few years, I discovered a whole branch of my family tree, who had come out to Australia in the early 1900s.”

A “moment of serendipity” came in 2016, while attending one of the Society’s annual picnics.

“My cousin, who I never knew I had, came to the picnic with a photo of one of our ancestors.

“And we discovered that we were related and that our relative Gerasimos Mavromates had come out to Australia in 1896.”

Kapourelakos says her family research is ongoing but she feels more motivated after an in person visit to the Archive of the Ithaca office, arranged via the Ithacan Historical Society (IHS).

Until then, Kapourelakos had relied on oral accounts to trace back her maternal genealogy.

“I didn’t realise there were gaps, until I obtained the documents.

“I think when we understand where we come from, we understand ourselves more and we appreciate our heritage and our parents a lot better too.”

Archive “frozen in time”

Kyriaco Nikias says this search for the past is at the centre of their work at the IHS.

He serves there as vice president since 2022.

“Genealogy is the key interest of public historical societies.

“And people are aware that the archive has the answers to their questions.”

So when news came in that the archive of Ithaca, the local branch of Greece’s state archives (Γενικά Αρχεία Κράτους) would reopen in late 2021 after years of closure, the Society knew “there will be a demand for people to go there and do their search.”

“It was a kind of mysterious place to all of us interested in the history of the island,” Nikias, an Australian legal historian and doctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, tells Neos Kosmos.

He says the archive also holds rich collections of public and historical records, dating back to around 1600.

“One of the most fascinating things that you can find there is letters sent to the governor of Ithaca by the Ottoman rulers of the mainland.”

They are of great historical value, he says, because Ottoman records across mainland Greece are not abundant nor studied thoroughly.

“They show ties between Venetian-ruled and Ottoman-ruled territories of Greek speaking people in the 17th century.”

Ken’s story

Ken Brownrigg is a descendant of Georgios Morfesis, an Ithacan who arrived in Melbourne in the early 1850s.

But Brownrigg only found out about this ancestor relatively recently.

“It wasn’t until much later in my mother’s life that we all learned that she was descended directly from one of the earliest Greeks to settle in Australia” he tells Neos Kosmos.

Over the years, snippets of information emerged about Morfesis through the family’s research.

Along with it, some myth busting too.

Like many interested in Greek Australian history, Brownrigg has read Hugh Gilchrist’s seminal trilogy ‘Australians and Greeks’*.

When he came across a mention of his ancestor’s name in one of the books, he started some thorough research.

“Gilchrist says Georgios Morfesis could have been the first Greek shopkeeper in Victoria, which isn’t true.

“This spreadsheet is a summary of what we know,” Brownrigg points to a two-pager he prepared.

“I have a list of professions for George from all sources. Look at the list – miner, railways, store man etc.

“The only time he is mentioned as anything like a shopkeeper was when listed as a fruiterer in the late 1890s when he was well into his 70s.”

Brownrigg joined the IHS in late 2022 to find out more about Morfesis’ origins through the archive of Ithaca.

In February 2023, some mixed news came in from the Archive manager.

“Based on the records consulted during the search, mostly of paper records yet to be digitised, the birth record could not be located.”

But the family was given a lead; the name of the only church at that specific timeframe that held deeds for the surname Morfesis.”There is now a place of pilgrimage for Australian descendants of George Morfesis when they make the journey to Vathi, Ithaca – and it’s on my bucket list!,” Brownrigg says.

Even before digitising the archives, Nikias says there’s “work that needs to be done in classification.”

“And that has to be done by professional historians who have knowledge of the period.”

What keeps him motivated is the unravelling of the island’s history.

“I’ve had an interest in it for a long time […] and the literature is poor, so we have a very vague idea of the history of the island.

“I realised that that’s not going to improve, unless we begin from the ground up,” Nikias concludes.

* Australians and Greeks by Hugh Gilchrist, Halstead Press, NSW, Sydney, 1997

To learn more about the Archive of Ithaca and the work of the Ithacan Historical Society visit ithacanhistorical.org/archive-of-ithaca