Diane,

I hope you enjoy this small part of your family history. It is a wonderful, happy, sad, and delightful story.

Love Pat

Christmas 1998

I was born in Fragata, on the Island of Cephallonia, the third day of March, 1902. Our home was not far from the Monastery of Saint Gerasimos, the patron saint of Cephallonia. When I was five, I, my parents, and my three sisters went to Russia. It seems like a dream now.

How would we live? We were now a family of nine. Seven children, five girls and two boys. My sister Maria had been born in 1914 and my baby brother just a few months before. My father did not loose hope. We had lost everything but he firmly believed that God would provide and help him to prosper again.

If a man marries a girl whose father promised him he would receive the family house, because there was nothing else to give the man as a dowry, and something happens and the father cannot fulfill his promise, the man can send the wife back to her father.

I was not happy with this kind of life, him in the States, myself and the boys in Greece. But there was nothing I could do about it. I was looking forward to and hoping for a better time when we could all live together.

Europe was beginning to fear war. We in America were not. America, did not fear war because it was thought to be highly unlikely to happen. We did not feel threatened at all, we simply didn’t see the dark clouds gathering and so we booked passage to Greece.