Is Meets Was

Greek Like Me?  has just been published on Lulu.com. I wrote this book to provide a vehicle for teaching our grandchildren and great nieces and great nephews about their Greek heritage. Greek? Take a peek. If you have a story to tell, you may want to use a similar approach. The book is 79 pages filled with illustrations and easy prose designed to provide children with an overview of Greek history from ancient times until the 1930s. In presenting a series of major historical events, I tried to provide a vision of how these events impacted one town in Greece and the lives of the ordinary citizens of that town, especially the family of Pavlos and Irini.  Also, I have published a private version of the book for family members only. The private version, called Koroni, Pavlos, and Irin i, includes an extensive set of charts displaying our family tree. Family members may contact me for the website address of the private version. © 2011, Cathy H Paris

Knocking down one brick wall after another over the last decade, each celebration of victory has been dampened by a twinge of guilt for not tackling our gaping hole. For our family, the gaping hole is our Greek heritage. When Nick and I were first married, we enrolled in a conversational Greek class, knowing that we wanted to meet his uncles, aunts, and cousins living in Greece, the homeland of Nick's father. That was 39 years ago. With the advent of 2010, we still hadn't learned Greek or met his uncles, aunts or cousins living in Greece. And we know so little about our Greek genealogy!  For the other branches of our family, we have family history information extending back at least to the 1850s.  Not so with the Greek side of our family! Rather than delaying a trip to Greece until we could overcome the language barrier and establish a relationship with Nick's cousins, we decided to enjoy Greece as tourists, deferring the finding of family to another trip. We arrived in ...