Event Brings Together Migration Experts

(MENAFN- Brazil-Arab News Agency (ANBA)) São Paulo – Genealogical research platform FamilySearch is hosting FamilySearch Immigrants at the Immigration Museum in São Paulo, an open-to-the-public event with lectures on immigration processes, cuisine from various countries, and research on the ancestors of those attending the event, from Thursday (29) through Saturday (31).

Experts in migration from countries such as Japan, Portugal, and Italy, among others, will participate in the event. A lecture on the Lebanese diaspora to Brazil is scheduled for Friday (30) and will be presented by genealogist Juliana Schuery.

Online platform FamilySearch is a research tool for people seeking information about their ancestors. Through it, it is possible to reconstruct a family tree and find information about relatives. According to the institution, it was first founded 125 years ago as a library, the Genealogical Society of Utah, in the United States. Since then, it has grown to become an online tool, with support from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

During a visit to the Arab-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce (ABCC) on Wednesday (28), Jonathan McCollum, Content Manager for the Middle East and North Africa at FamilySearch, and Natali Lenning, Program Manager for the Middle East and North Africa at FamilySearch, said that Brazil is an important place for recovering history and documents related to immigration due to the large influx of migrants the country has received.

“Sometimes the records are lost, and FamilySearch has done a lot to work with Brazilian entities to digitize and then index and publish online records that are useful to find immigrants in Brazil. However, finding the records in the Middle East is something FamilySearch has just begun in the last few years,” said McCollum, noting that many immigrant documents are held by governments, religious institutions, or kept by families and can be crucial for communities that establish strong family connections, as is the case with Arabs.

Lenning noted that the ABCC is a major repository of digitized documents that can be connected to those already available through FamilySearch, thus helping to tell the story of children, uncles, and nephews who emigrated to Brazil or were born in the country as descendants of Arabs.

Akram Khater, Director of the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina, is also in Brazil for the event at the Immigration Museum and visited the ABCC. The center partners with the Library of the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK) as part of the arabicarchives project to facilitate research in the digital collection on Arab immigration in Latin America housed in the library. In turn, USEK partners with the ABCC on the Digitization Project of the Memory of Arab Immigration in Brazil. Through this project, the two institutions digitize documents provided by families and institutions, depicting the migration of their ancestors.

“We are specifically talking about Arab diaspora. So, a lot of times, letters, photographs, newspapers, books and objects tell the rich history of how people left for South America, Central America and North America. And so, we want to interview people and help them preserve that so that we can preserve these rich histories and highlight their contributions to whatever society whether they are in, whether they are California or in São Paulo,” said Khater.“We've created a large archive that allows people to search for and find their histories, whether they are just interested in their own families or are academics writing about immigration,” he said.

Read more:
Partnership facilitates research in immigration collection

Translated by Guilherme Miranda

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