Mr Lagakos, Pam, cousin Maria, and cousin Kanellos

Every once in a while, something happens during a book talk that knocks my socks off.  Recently, it happened again.

After one of my presentations, Pam Chaconas came up to me and said, “I felt as though I could finish your sentences.” She, too, had gone back to her ancestral village and found family she never knew she had.

Her family was Greek, her village was Kaminia, and the similarities in our stories were uncanny.

In 2002, Pam and her husband traveled to Greece looking for Kaminia, the village in the Peloponnese her grandmother Evangeline had left some eighty years earlier.

When they arrived, they stopped at a taverna where several men were drinking coffee. Pam’s husband explained in Greek that his wife’s Yia Yia had come from Kaminia and that they were looking for the Politis family.

Pam was holding a photograph of her grandmother.

One of the men, Mr. Lagakos, took one look at the photo and immediately called out the name, “Evangeline Politis.” Then he motioned for them to follow him.

He led them to a stone house surrounded by olive trees and called out to the people inside. A man and woman, Kanellos and Maria, appeared. After a flurry of conversation in Greek that Pam couldn’t understand, it became clear that these were the relatives she had come so far to find.

Kanellos walked toward her with his arms outstretched.

There were hugs. Laughter. Tears.

Then Kanellos went into the house and returned holding an old photograph. It was a photograph of Pam and her sister as children!

Evangeline had left this tiny Greek village eighty years earlier. Pam had never met these people. Yet they had kept a photograph of her and her sister.

They hadn’t forgotten.

As I listened to Pam, I realized that the desire to find our roots is more universal than I had imagined. It’s far bigger than genealogy. It’s about standing where your grandmother once stood, walking the roads she walked, seeing the mountains she saw, and meeting people who still remember the family name generations later.

Maybe we don’t go back simply to discover where they came from.

Maybe we go back because we are trying to understand where we came from.

 

Note: If you’ve read LIFETIME or Stay Close, please consider writing a review on Amazon or Goodreads. I’d love for LIFETIME to be translated into Italian as was done with STAY CLOSE, and reviews make a difference. Thanks for considering.