Hi Trevor, welcome to Rootschat.
In order to try and trace your ancestors' births or marriages in Cyprus, you would have to know their religion in order to track down their parish church. The religion can often be inferred from names. Greek-Cypriot Christian names point to the Greek Orthodox faith 90% of the time, but conversions were possible, as were inter-faith marriages.
Now, Lotifia is definitely not a Greek or Cypriot name. One way to check this is to see if there are any Eastern Orthodox saints with the same name - the Greek Orthodox Church forbids baptisms with non-Orthodox names. There are no St. Lotifias. So could it be a variant of Latifia/Latifah (Arabic) or Latife (Turkish)? There was a large Muslim population all over Cyprus in the 19th century, then under Ottoman rule. Nowadays the North is mostly Turkish Muslim. Or, could it be a variation of Lot (Hebrew)? There were many Sephardic Jews on the island in the past, especially around Famagusta in the late Ottoman period. Many would have become Hellenicised over generations, intermarried with Greek Orthodox and converted to Christianity.
Her maiden surname Georgora (variant: Georgoura) can be found in Greece today, but it is quite unusual in Cyprus. It means "of George". The male surname is Georgoras, with an 's' at the end. One problem with identifying ancestors in Cyprus and Greece is that Greek surnames used to be dynamic (changeable from one generation to the next): they often took the
first name of the father as a surname. So Lotte's father first name was probably George, but his surname was probably
his father's first name.
Robas can be a Greek surname (from Greece), pronounced Ro
vas - accent on the last syllable. The letter beta in the Greek alphabet is a v sound and often mistranscribed in English or Anglicised as a b. In the Cypriot island dialect 'rovi' means 'pomegranate'. It is probably an occupational name: he or his father may have owned a pomegranate orchard, or worked on one. It could also be a variation of the surname Rouvas, of which there are a few in Cyprus today. The online phone book yields 8.
Gabriel can be a Greek name named after St. Gabriel the Archangel, pronounced [Gav
ril] or [Gav
rilis]. It could also be Jewish (Gavri'el). There is a Robas on the Shoah Memorial in Paris.
The evidence suggests your great-grandfather was Greek Orthodox, but we can't discount Roman Catholic, Anglican, Jewish or other. Cyprus was/is a melting pot of races and religions.
BMD registers in Cyprus were rarely held by municipal authorities in the late 19th century. The records, if any, will be held by his local church. Without any indication which part of Cyprus he came from or lived in, you are up against a Herculean task. If he lived in the North (now Turkish), many church records were lost or destroyed during and after the 1974 war. The Cyprus government has no access to any records currently held by the TRNC.
Your best bet would be to post in Cyprus forums, and hope someone researching the same family comes forward, although native Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots on the island are not known for investigating their ancestry as it is so difficult to track down official records. There are also language barriers.
You could try:
http://genforum.genealogy.com/cyprus/http://www.cyprus-forum.com/http://www.looking4kin.com/group/cyprus-genealogyhttp://surnames.meaning-of-names.com/genealogy/cyprus/http://support.genopro.com/Topic7655.aspxAnother thought: have you ever considered taking a DNA test? This might narrow down a very specific geographical area, or give you further clues.
Do visit Cyprus though. Spring (May) and autumn (Oct) are the nicest times.
