Narayana Family: Brief History and Demography: With Early Life Story of Nara Somaratne

By Nara Somaratne and Kumari Narayana

The book research the origin of the Narayana family, possibly arriving from Kerala States of India during Kurunegala kingdom in Sri Lanka.
Descendants of authors grandparents and their distribution around the world is described.
The early life story of the lead author Nara Somaratne is given to illustrate how difficult the life in 1960’s in poorest sector of Sri Lanka, and show that still one can achieve their dream by relentlessly pursuing studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inspiring Publishers / ASPG
• Release date: Dec 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781923087538

Book preview

PREFACE

My interest in researching Narayana family history started about 20 years ago and has recently sparked up again as I am close to retirement. I thought I should spend time and compile the available information. As my children and several nieces and nephews are now living in overseas, someone in the genealogy line may start looking for his or her ancestral history. This document attempts to fill the gap, to some extent, and give knowledge on our ancestry. I initially talked with my eldest sister who lived in Inguruwatte and kept note of the information provided to me, particularly names of my grandparents and siblings of my father. With this scanty information, I built a very crude family tree to expand and refine on later. I regret that I was not able to tap into the memories of family elders 20 years ago, but I am happy that now, as a family elder myself, I am able to write down some details for future generations. In 50 years’ time, this will be a valuable document and truly a family history book.

It is somewhat unfortunate that most adults do not know their grandparents names, who they were and what they did. Nearly all adults, including myself, do not know any details about their own great-grandparents. However, most of us know to great details about human evolution, Sri Lankan and world history. Some people even take great interest in finding out details about the pedigree of their pets and race horses that they bet on.

In western societies, births, deaths and details of immigrations are meticulously recorded in churches and also in other public offices making it far easier to trace ancestory. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Sri Lanka. Other common reasons are the social withdrawal from poor or uneducated family members, dispute over ownership of lands or even unimportant issues such as marriages to ‘so called unacceptable families based on the cast’.

Early humans thought to have left Africa about 2 million years ago. They were of similar socio-economic conditions, they had no divisions between rich or poor, educated or uneducated almost certainly had no elites in families. It is considered that the first people came to Australia about 60,000 years ago, well before the beginning of the agricultural societies and civilisation that began about 12,000 years ago. However, with no written common language, Aboriginal Australian kept recordings of their family history and other knowledge and memory by oral tradition and passed them to their successive generations. This made me ashamed to say, even at over 70 years old, I do not know the names of my great-grandparents, and I do not wish successive generations to be in this position. Our present day will be the past history of future generations. We are not unique individuals. What we have is accumulation of life experience, habits, and even shapes of our ancestors and tendencies from our past Karma.

I am fortunate to have my younger sister Kumari Narayana, who coauthored this book. She reached out to maternal and paternal families to collect details and received so much help from them. All of them have taken interest in knowing the family history, who they are and where they are now. Based primarily on reminiscences, previous discussion with family elders and interviews with living relatives to some extent we have a description of the demographics of the family. However, it is unfortunate that details of most of the female family members are not available.

I sincerely express my gratitude to the following people. T.B. Narayana who helped to trace the background of family line and showed the land once owned by my father N.M. Jinadasa and his burial site; Suranga Jayathilaka for providing his family details; Abey Narayana for providing photographs of our grandparents’ graves; to Mahinda Herath for willingly driving around our ancestral villages to meet relatives and to Chamandani Herath for the library search and providing history of the Narayana family.

It was not an easy task to assemble information provided in this volume. Obviously, there may be errors, omissions, and mistakes. It is kindly requested to point out any missing details to update for the future.

Agenealogical reference number was developed to identify individual’s position and link to the family tree beginning with N.M. Ukkubanda (grandfather of authors) is related as follows:

N 1.1 : N.M. Ukkubanda (N is for Narayana)

N 1.1.5 : 5th child of N.M. Ukkubanda (N.M. Jinadasa)

N 1.1.5.6 : 6th child of N.M. Jinadasa (Nara Somaratne)

N.1.1.5.6.1 : 1st child of Nara Somaratne (Tharaka Narayana)

N 1.1.5.6.1.1 : 1st child of Tharaka Narayana (Lucy Narayana)

N 1.1.5.6.1.2 : 2nd child of Tharaka Narayana (Clara Narayana)

This family history is divided into two parts—firstly showing the family tree which displays each family members position from the known ancestors and secondly, a readable narrative of the family with photographs. As the ancestoral history cannot be traced beyond my grandparents, this book attempts to cover all individuals and their descendants, with chapters organised by generation. In addition to the Narayana family, my maternal ancestry, Bamunu Mudiyanselage is also included.

This family history has been written in hope that, current and future generations will come close to each other, share their common values, and help each other when it is needed. Thus, in addition to the position in the family tree; information about the places where the family members lives or approximate locations, names of individuals and their spouses, employment, hobies and special skills and achievements are also included. The book is intended to be distributed to every family member for future reference.

A special section is also added; my own early life story to show how difficult life was in the poorest sector of society, living in the Huruluwewa colonisation scheme. This shows how the collective