My Family's Ancestry

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Gathering research about my family and its history turned out to be an interesting and insightful opportunity, through which I learned much more than I expected. When I started this project, I knew that I would not be able to find as much useful information on the Internet as some of my peers. In effect, I realized that I would have to rely on other primary resources such as my parents and grandparents to reveal the story of my ancestry to me. After I had interviewed them, my family history became much clearer to me.
More than 2 millennia ago, around the 3rd century BC, a group of Tamil-speaking people from present-day South India migrated to the nearby island of Sri Lanka. Among these people, known today as “Sri Lankan Tamils”, are my ancestors. Centuries later, in the 1200’s, these Tamils formed the Jaffna Kingdom, an independent monarchy covering the northern part of Sri Lanka. In 1505, the Portuguese took control of almost the entire island, and, over the next few centuries, control of the island shifted between the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. After several wars and treaties, Britain gained total control of Sri Lanka (then called “Ceylon”) by 1815.
After the Sri Lankan Tamils arrival in Sri Lanka, over time, a caste system developed in their society. There were the Karaiyar (fishing) and Piramanar (Brahmin) castes for example. Both my maternal and paternal ancestors were members of the Vellalar caste, which is composed of agricultural landlords. Members of this caste, a rather large one, made their living by growing cash crops and selling them at the local markets.
The majority of my ancestors lived in the small village of Puloly, in what is now the town of Point Pedro at the northernmost tip of the island. Pulol...

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...is generation had hopes of being more than farmers and adapting to technologically advancing and evolving world. My appappa and ammamma married on September 14, 1962. Soon after, he was promoted to electrical engineer and was relocated to Batticaloa, a town on the eastern coast of the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. Together, they lived in Batticaloa and had two boys and three girls, one of whom is my mother.
Parents
My father (appa) was born on November 26, 1960 in a hospital near Puloly. Around this time, tension started to grow between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, the major ethnic group of Sri Lanka. In 1956, eight years after independence, Solomon Bandaranaike, a Sinhalese nationalist, became the prime minister of Sri Lanka. He made the Sinhalese the national language of Sri Lanka and encouraged the government to support Buddhism, the religion of the Sinhalese.

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