Old photographs tell the story that names and dates cannot — formal portraits, candid moments, the ancestral home in Central Kerala.
From Central Travancore to the foothills of Wayanad — a family who cleared forests and built a new life in Malabar.
The Chenathara family — the spelling used here — originally belonged to Central Travancore. Their migration to Malabar in the late 1940s, prompted by limited land and limited means, transformed a farming family into pioneers who cleared forests and built new lives from the ground up.
This record began as a handwritten document, gradually expanded into the directory you see here. It is a work in progress: corrections, additions, and old photographs are always welcome.
It was in the summer of 1981, when as a fifteen years old, that I made my first journey to Malabar. In many ways, that trip also marked the beginning of my discovery of my mother's family.
My mother's maternal relatives had made their lives in Malabar, and until then I knew very little about them or the place they called home. For a boy accustomed to city life, my first glimpse of Malabar was unforgettable. It seemed endlessly green and beautiful, with wide open spaces, wildlife, birds, fishing, trees heavy with fruit, and a closeness to nature that I had never experienced before. I fell in love with the place almost immediately.
But I was equally fascinated by the people I was meeting. Who were all these relatives? How were they connected to one another? Where had they come from, and how had this family found its way to Malabar?
Out of sheer curiosity, during that very first visit I began roughly charting a family tree, writing down names and trying to understand the relationships between the different branches of the family. I could hardly have imagined then where that simple exercise would eventually lead.
More than four decades have passed since those first handwritten notes. What began as the curiosity of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy gradually grew into a much larger effort to trace, document and preserve our family history, eventually finding its way onto this website.
Two people who deserve special mention in bringing this work to its present stage are my second cousins C N Doncy and C V Soju. Collecting the names and details of so many relatives is no small undertaking. It takes time and trouble to gather and put together an enormous amount of family information. I am grateful to them for that effort, because much of what we are able to preserve here today would have been far more difficult without their contribution.
This website is certainly not the end of the journey. It is simply another stage in something that began for me in Malabar all those years ago.
Someday, I hope another member of the family will take what we have assembled, carry it forward, build an even better website, add the generations and family members who follow us, and continue preserving the story.
After all, a family tree is never really finished. Each generation simply adds another branch.
This record is the work of many hands. These family members gave their time to help bring it together.