WHERE 'THE WEST' BEGINS: FT. WORTH HELLENES by Steve Frangos published in The National Herald January 11, 2020 The National Herald has given HellenicGenealogyGeek.com permission to post articles that are of interest to our group. -------------------------------------------- For well over a century the Greeks of Fort Worth Texas have not only lived but markedly changed the community they now call home. A convergence of unexpectedly dissimilar historical events gradually led to the establishment of this now vibrant Greek-American colony. In 1890, Demetrios Anagnostakis, a native of Crete, was the first Greek to settle in Ft. Worth. As community memories attest Anagnostakis was so influenced by his reading of Zane Grey novels that he came West to be a cowboy. Rather than a life on the trail driving the long horns to the rail heads Anagnostakis first worked for the “Fort Worth Trading Company as a yard man in the cattle pens. By 1904, Anagnostakis was ...

Ancestry.com ($) has a database titled AFRICA, ASIA AND EUROPE, PASSENGER LISTS OF DISPLACED PERSONS, 1946-1971 which includes 3,133 people who were born in Greece .  There are an additional 2,569 people born in Turkey, some with Greek sounding names. DESCRIPTION The upheavals wrought by Nazi persecution and the Second World War caused mass uprooting of individuals and groups. Many of these individuals wished to emigrate from Europe in order to begin a new life – a goal supported and coordinated by the International Refugee Organization (IRO) and later by the Intergovernmental Committee for the Movements of Migrants from Europe (ICEM). This collection consists of passenger lists of immigrants leaving Germany and other European ports and airports between 1946-1971. The majority of the immigrants listed in this collection are displaced persons - Holocaust survivors, former concentration camp inmates and Nazi forced laborers, as well as refugees from Central and Eastern E...

FamilySearch.org has a FREE database titled TEXAS, WORLD WAR II DRAFT REGISTRATION CARDS, 1940-1947 .  There are 300 people in these records that show Greece as their place of birth .  There are an additional 88 showing Turkey as their place of birth. The collection consists of a name index and images of draft registration cards of men who registered during World War II with the exception of the Fourth Registration (see General Information below). It covers the years 1940 to 1945 and includes information of young men aged 18-44. The event place is the home of the registrant. This collection is part of the National Archives Records Administration’s (NARA) Records of the Selective Service System. 1940– Record Group 147: Records of the Selective Service.  The following information may be found in these records: Name, Serial Number, and Order Number Address Telephone Age and date of birth Place of birth Country of citizenship Name of person who will always k...

t FamilySearch.org  has a  FREE  database titled  TEXAS, PASSENGER AND CREW LISTS OF VESSELS ARRIVING AT CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS AND VICINITY, JUNE 1948 - JANUARY 1959 .  There are  546 people in these records that show Greece as their place of birth .  There are an additional 7 showing Turkey as their place of birth. DESCRIPTION This collection contains passenger and crew lists of vessels arriving at Corpus Christi, Texas, and Vicinity, June 1948-January 1959. The records usually include the name of the vessel, ports and dates of departure and arrival, and the following information about each crew member: full name, position in ship’s company, age, gender, race, nationality. These records correspond with NARA publication A3458 and were filmed at the NARA facility in College Park, Maryland.

FamilySearch.org has a FREE database titled ARIZONA, NOGALES, INDEX AND MANIFESTS OF ALIEN ARRIVALS, 1905-1952 .  There are 632 people in these records that show Greece as their place of birth .  There are an additional 206 showing Turkey as their place of birth, some with Greek sounding names. DESCRIPTION This collection contains over 455,000 manifests and related index cards of permanent and temporary alien arrivals at Nogales, Arizona, 1905-1952. The cards are arranged alphabetically by surname and include such information as name, age, gender, marital status, occupation, citizenship, race, last permanent residence, birthplace, etc. The original records were filmed by the INS in August-October 1956 and then destroyed. The microfilms were later transferred to the National Archives under NARA publication M1769.

THE SPOOKY VILLAGE OF VATHI IS HAUNTING by Andy Dabilis published in The National Herald December 7, 2019 The National Herald has given HellenicGenealogyGeek.com permission to post articles that are of interest to our group. --------------------------------------------  Atop a hill not far from the sea in the Mani region of the Peloponnese sits the mostly abandoned stone village of Vathi, also known as Vathia, and a place that can have you looking over your shoulder for ghosts as you walk through the ruins of what once was. This is an area – it’s said in Greece you don’t mess with Cretans or Maniates, known for their toughness – where you can almost hear the phantoms of the past in the wind that bounces off the stone walls of empty buildings, some still holding decaying furniture and appliances. The last census in 2011 said there were 33 people living there, evident in a few places that had been renovated, and there’s a small café for touris...

Ancestry.com has a new database titled: U.S. WWII HOSPITAL ADMISSION CARD FILES, 1942-1954 .  Listed are 84 people born in Greece , plus another 6 people, with possible Greek names, born in Turkey. Source :   Hospital Admission Card Files, ca. 1970 - ca. 1970 . NAI:  570973 . Records of the Office of the Surgeon General (Army), 1775 - 1994. Record Group 12. The National Archives at College Park, MD. USA About the Database: The files contain records pertaining to some 5.3 million patients, mostly U.S. Army personnel wounded in battle during World War II and the Korean War. The World War II records include only Army personnel treated at Army facilities, but the Korean War records include a few records (approximately 5 percent) for non-Army personnel and non-Army treatment facilities (approximately 4 percent). The records contain various medical treatment information about each patient including diagnoses, operations, and dates and places of hospitalization. ...

THE NHM LAUNCHES FREE ONLINE  COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES PORTAL published in The National Herald August 10, 2019 ----- To all our Hellenic Genealogy Geek members - This could make a huge difference when trying to communicate with relatives in Greece. -------------------------------------------- CHICAGO – Dedicated to holding significant memories of the Greek American experience and Hellenic legacy, the National Hellenic Museum (NHM) announced, on July 24 the launch of the NHM Collections & Archives Portal, which allows anyone to access the Museum’s catalogs online from anywhere by viewing digitized artifacts and archival materials.  With the largest collection of its kind in the world, including a rich repository of over 20,000 Greek-American artifacts, photos, historic newspapers, books, and an archive of over 450 recorded oral histories, the NHM serves as a resource at the center of the community’s past, present, and future.  Vis...

s REMOTE VILLAGES GET THE NET published in The National Herald November 30, 2019 ----- To all our Hellenic Genealogy Geek members - This could make a huge difference when trying to communicate with relatives in Greece. -------------------------------------------- Travelers and residents in Greece's far outpost remote villages and islands get to enjoy the natural wonders but not the Internet which was not available or slow to those who had alternate means of connecting, but a European Union project is helping bring them Wi Fi and access to a whole new electronic world.  In a feature, Euronews revealed how it's been a revelation and changing lives for people who've lived in faraway villages in mountains, valleys and elsewhere, such as Megalo Papigo, in the Zagori region of northern Greece's Pindos Mountains, with some 5000 villages getting broadband Internet access.  "I have experienced life before and after the Internet," N...

ADOPTION, MEMORY, AND COLD WAR GREECE:  Kid pro quo? by Gonda Van Steen Published November 2019 This book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek children in the United States, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the global Cold War. Greek-to-American adoptions and, regrettably, also their transactions and transgressions, provided the blueprint for the first large-scale international adoptions, well before these became a mass phenomenon typically associated with Asian children. The story of these Greek postwar and Cold War adoptions, whose procedures ranged from legal to highly irregular, has never been told or analyzed before.  Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece  answers the important questions: How did these adoptions from Greece happen? Was there any money involved? Humanitarian rescue or  kid pro quo ? Or both? With s...

Published in NEOS KOSMOS - 30 November 2018 - authored by Theodora Maios This article was sent to me by JoAnn Pavlostathis ----- Young but courageous, helpless but determined to succeed, the first Greek migrants who arrived in Australia in the early 1900s, seeking a better future for themselves and their families, are without a doubt the real heroes of the diaspora. While most Greek migration to Australia is associated with the period immediately following World War II, in the early 1900s chain-migration patterns began resulting in large numbers of arrivals, mainly from the islands of Kythera, Ithaca and Kastellorizo. Predominantly male, the Greeks arrived in Australia and worked hard in fruit farms, factories and mines in order to make a better life for themselves. According to testimonies, upon arrival in the land of opportunity, the young adventurers were greeted with suspicion and fear by the residents of a country that was already trying to overcome its own anti-mi...

I found this helpful video on YouTube.  It demonstrates the different styles of writing letters in the Greek alphabet.   For those of us who are not fluent in Greek it can be very useful when trying to translate handwritten names in Greek records. A few examples:

  FamilySearch.org has a FREE database titled "United States Passport Applications, 1795-1925". There are 58 applications for people born in Greece .  An application could include more than one family member (see example above). Description of database: Passport Application, Alabama, United States, source certificate #8168, Passport Applications, January 2, 1906 - March 31, 1925 , 187, NARA microfilm publications M1490 and M1372 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.).