One of the most frustrating things about going through Grandma's photo collection of the family over the century (and I mean that literally; many of them go back to before 1926) is that she didn't write on the back of all of them. I have so many pictures of strangers I am probably related to, but I have no way of knowing who they are. I've sent them to my aunt, the only person on Mom's side of the family older than me, and she's unfortunately at a loss most of the time.
I've had to let that go. On the off chance that someone else posted their copies of the pictures online, I ran them through Lens, and I still came up with nothing. Ah well.
One of the good things of going through this collection, though, was finding a treasure trove of letters from Gramps's cousin, Bessie, which oftentimes also had photos in them, although there were a few that were photocopies of the originals. So now I have a bunch of other pictures of strangers I'm probably related to, and I'll never know who they are.
But then I found this utter gem of Gramps's family taken back in Greece:
I don't know who almost all of these people are, but I recognized a few faces. I'll point them out below:
This is my great-grandfather, Nick Kyriakopoulos, Gramps's dad. This is one of two pictures I have of him before he was horribly burned in a fire that happened at his shoe repair shop in Chicago.
That little girl is Gramps's sister, Helen. I also have a few of her letters, in addition to her last will and testament, of which Gramps was named executor. She also sent him lots of info copied from medical journals about colitis, which he suffered from back when I was in college. Oddly enough, the gastroenterologist who helped cure him of that is currently *my* gastroenterologist.
[Side note: One of Helen's sons, like me, is named after Gramps. I found a picture of him sitting with Gramps in front of a coffee table with some books on it. Among them is The Anarchist's Cookbook, so he and I may have more in common than who we were named after.]
This little baby will grow up to be Bessie Gruning, Gramps's cousin who sent this package to him. She is flanked by her parents. I believe his name is Harry, but I'm not 100% sure.
That is my great-grandmother, Jennie Demeroukas. She couldn't read or write, and when she had to sign things, she had to "make her mark," meaning she would write an X or a + on the dotted line. I have one paper she signed with her thumbprint. She couldn't speak English, only Greek.
These two are George and Mike Demeroukas, Gramps's uncles. They, too, would come to America, and I found pictures of George at Grandma and Gramps's wedding. Mike was Gramps's godfather. I have a separate picture of him holding baby Gramps with that info written on the back.
Not even Bessie knew who all of these people were, but she did have a few notes with names. Even though I have some names for the faces, I still don't know how they're related to me. But then I saw she made a note that one of the people in this picture was her grandma. Meaning, Gramps's grandma.
MEANING MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMA.
Holy shit! I raced to find which one she was. I look like Mom. Mom looks like Gramps. I discovered Gramps looked like his mom. I wanted to know if she looked like *her* mom. I wanted to see how much of me I could find in her. And what did I see when I got to the position she was supposed to be in?
Dammit! Now I'll never know! Although I could see a cheek that looked kind of like what Gramps had going on when he was in his old age. I had to assume that Jennie looked like her mom, but I would never know for sure. Disappointed, I got back to looking through the rest of the letters Bessie wrote to Gramps.
There were quite a few of them, so it took me a week before I found this picture in one of them:
You'll recognize George and Mike in the back and Helen on the bottom left. It's hard to tell from the other picture, but the woman standing above her is Jennie. And who is that sitting in the chair?
According to the back of the photo (in Helen's handwriting, by the way) it states that this is her grandma. My great-great-grandma. Helen had sent this to Bessie, who had sent it to Gramps, but Helen had written on it, "Her name's Bessie, too."
Bessie Demeroukas, my great-great-grandma. I think that's about as far back as I can get to see the evolution of faces that would eventually become mine. Photography goes back a lot farther than most think, but it was usually reserved for important or rich people. Maybe one day I'll discover more, but wow. I can't believe I managed to find a picture of my great-great-grandma.
That baby she's holding? In case you were wondering, that's Gramps.
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