Kindo Family Blog

The two industrial powerhouses Tata & Birla are benchmarks for many global organizations across the globe. JRD Tata and Aditya Birla led the industrial revolution in the early part of the 20th century. Since then, the family tradition has been carried forward by Ratan Tata and Kumara Managalam Birla.

These two families have brought huge success and fame for India at a world stage. While Birla has become a household name in cement, Tata has revolutionzed the automobile industry with its common man car ‘Tata Nano’.

Team Kindo salutes the two giants with our very own family trees. Check out Birla’s family tree here and Tata family tree here. Please take a look and let us know your thoughts on them

For more information about celebrities and their family trees please visit our Celebrity Family Trees page. You can also suggest us a celebrity or best send their family tree to us.

Mid-fielder Michael Ballack is a super-star football player for Germany & Chelsea. Michael Ballack has come a long way from his early days as an u-21 debutant against Denmark in 1996. He played a key role in Germany’s march to final in the 2002 world cup. Captain of Germany since 2004, he led his side to a third place finish in the 2006 world-cup. At club level, he has been instrumental in Chelsea’s success this season. The famous trio of Ballack, Lampard & Drogba are a big threat to the opposition teams.

To mark respect to this footbal legend & his family, team Kindo has created his family tree. Check out Michael Ballack’s family tree here

For more information about Michael Ballack and other celebrities please visit our celebrity family trees page.

Hope you had a nice St. George’s Day. By the way: Not only people from England celebrate it as their Saints day of death, also people from some regions in Spain, Portugal, Georgia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Moskow
Read more about George’s history on wikipedia.

photo credit: lant_70

In ancient times no such thing existed and since we lived in tiny, closely knitted communities and we believe such information was passed on by word of mouth. Early scrolls provide scant information and as soon as they started showing up, we depended on the census records here. Once we learnt to write, we started recording everything!

Information was very difficult to find during the middle ages and it is only quite a while after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440 that accurate records start appearing because systems improved and because there were more Bibles printed – even though these were very few and far between. Remember that books were a rarity. The Catholic Church, that ruled Europe at the time with the assistance of the Canon Law, had their hands full with persecutions, stimulation of wars and a fervent need to cleanse everyone and everything. There was little time to educate the masses – much less a need for it and they had no time to have Bibles printed for the people. It must be remembered how prominently the Catholic Church featured in the lives of our ancestors living in Europe.

Now for today and our need to record our own family trees! To start, you will need birth records or death certificates. Usually the latter records the date of birth, the cause, exact date and time of death. However, death certificates may not always have been issued in the more recently developed nations. In Australia, America and South Africa where pioneers were responsible for the birth and development of a modern nation, the Family Bibles are the most important source because very often these were the only records ever kept. Life in a wagon on a wagon trail was hard and once the pioneers arrived at their destinations, they still had to develop communities and only then built towns. The Family Bible was the only viable vehicle in which to record such vital information.

In most families, the family Bibles will contain extremely accurate information of a family tree – as well as information about where that first relative came from – and researching then becomes much easier. In Europe reasonable records were kept, often without the aid of the Family Bible – with the exception of countries where natural disasters occurred, of course – like in Holland where some of my own family records were lost when an entire town was flooded!

Nowadays we have the web and a massive amount of information can be found online. Online information does save time and endless trips to libraries, archives and government departments but more often than not one will be unable to find the detailed information contained in a Family Bible. There are millions of family Bibles all over the world and numerous American websites devoted entirely to them – but even those cannot function without the Bibles themselves.

Most Family Bibles contain more than one surname because when marriages were recorded, the full names of both bride and groom were entered, thus introducing completely new families to the family tree. In this way, one finds long forgotten links to maiden names, names of Godparents and all the baptismal records for that family. Here the birth dates will be recorded very accurately. I have even found Bibles where someone recorded the census records – a good tip for trying to locate that elusive relative is to search through census records. But to save yourself a lot of frustration, do try and find your old Family Bibles.

It is difficult, even impossible, for someone of Khoisan descent to build a family tree that goes back further than two, maybe three generations.

It is generally believed that the Khoikhoi arrived in the Cape about 2,000 years ago, having migrated South from outside South African borders. A peaceful people they were hunters gatherers.

In order to make any study of genealogy, one would need to have access to records of some kind – written records. Here the problem arises. It was only in the 19th century that two German ethnographers became the first people to write down the Khoisan folklore, belief and customs. All this information was received verbally from a few informants.

Accurate family trees for Kindo members of Khoisan descent may be more difficult to do than for some other cultural groups for the simple reason that there was no written records. The later governments did not provide for this but, largely, the nature of the way of life of this incredible people was such that it was impossible to keep track of who was born and who died and when. It is only in the last few decades that we have systems in place that ensure accurate record keeping and the many prominent leaders and educated citizens will certainly see to it.

So to the Kindo members – persevere and visit that old aunt or grandmother for the true information.

Thank you to Jacoba for her input on this article.

My grandparents all died far too early. But as a child I had two lovely grandmas, and I often took the train with my mother or older sister to go and visit them. I really enjoyed seeing them and have learned a lot from them. One grandma was called “Oma Stuttgart”, which is the German word for granny and the city where she lived (Stuttgart), as that was an easy distinction between the two for baby Mario
The other grandma was called “Oma Käthe” – well otherwise kids don’t get the difference between grandma and grandma.

This is much simpler for the Swedes. They actually have two words for grandma: “farmor” and “mormor”, something like “mumsmum” and “dadsmum”. So “Oma Stuttgart” was my dad’s mum, my farmor

This is pretty clever and actually works like that for most of the family relationships. There is four words for “grandchild” (which is “barnbarn”, a “kids’kid”), two for grandsons and two for granddaughters:

• dotterson, the daughter of your son the son of your daughter
• sonson, the son of your son
• dotterdotter :-), is the daughter of your daughter
• sondotter, obviously the son of your daughter well the daughter of your son

Maybe a bit confusing for those who want to learn Swedish, but it’s a great system isn’t it?

If you don’t sit next to a nice Swede like Martin (I do), you can learn more Swedish family vocabulary here.

Recent few weeks have seen an upsurge in the coverage across ‘English’ market. Here’s a quick recap of some of the blogs who have talked about Kindo.

Crenk.com - Steven Finch talks about our new photo sharing feature.

Kindo.com is a family networking site in which users can build their own free family tree, invite whoever is a part of it, and stay in touch with their loved ones.

Webware.com - A brief reference of Kindo in a blog-post essentially focused on family social networking site.

Online Media Cultist - Web producer and writer Eric berlin talks about our ‘new contacts importer’ feature.

I love when company blogs are used to help people better understand and use products’.

Kate’s Family Tree - Kate expresses her opinion on Kindo.

I’ve just been having a look at Kindo, an online social network for family historians. The idea is, you create an account, and begin adding your family using the simple interface - really, it is very easy to use.

Thank you so much guys for your kind words of appreciation. We are glad that you liked Kindo Please, keep your thoughts coming.

When we’ve built a site for families in 14 different languages, we can see how much of the most important things in life are similar for us humans all over the word: Strong family ties, the way we gather for holidays, how food has a central role when we meet up etc… Still though, there are small funny details that vary a lot. See for instance the blog posts from last December, when Kindo users from all over the world contributed with stories how their families celebrated the season’s holidays.

When we earlier launched our Family-Polls here on the blog, it was because we were curious to see if there were other similarities or differences between countries. The first poll was about how geographically spread out our families are. Now for a while, a new one has been up. This one is about a very important person - our mums!

How often do YOU call your mother? Maybe she is the one that calls you… Maybe even a bit too often? Click here in the poll a bit down here on the right side, and you’ll be part of the unique international poll.

The result will be up in some weeks!

Los Angeles Times has a nice sunshine story today - have a look here.

Look at how fast the ducklings swim to get back to their mother in the end - impressive!

photo credit: skenmy

Just wanted to let you know: We will be presenting Kindo at the next Minibar here in London. It will take place at Corbet Place Bar at the entrance of the Trueman Brewery on Friday, April 25th. Thanks to Christian for organising this great event.

The event is sponsored by London Development Agency and Make Your Mark. Besides Martin and me there will be presenting Reshma Sohoni from Seedcamp.com, Guido Picus from Jivelo.com, Dan McQuillan from Make Your Mark, Jamie Andrews from The Carbon Account and the winners of the Social Innovation Camp, “Enabled by Design” and “Prison visits”.

Come over and be part of it, it’s gonna be a nice event! Register here or just sneak in on the day itself.