A house with two ports of origin

On the morning of March 18, 1924, the SS Themistocles sailed from Piraeus to New York carrying a Belle-Époque-trained physician, his wife, and four of their sons. Lazaros Jeannopoulos was fifty, a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine of the Université de Paris, the President of the National Defense Organization of his hometown Soma in Asia Minor, a delegate to the 1910 National Assembly of the Ecumenical Patriarchate at Constantinople, and — for the last eighteen months — a refugee. Two years earlier the Greek world of his thirty-year medical practice had ended. The Turkish irregulars that overran Smyrna in September 1922 burned the Greek and Armenian quarters; some 1.5 million Anatolian Greeks were expelled in the months that followed. Lazaros led the Greek community of Soma across the eight-mile strait to the island of Mytilene, and from there, in two trips through Athens, assembled the most carefully documented emigration portfolio in the family archive — testimonials from the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Metropolis of Smyrna in exile, the Diocese of Ephesus, the Soma Community Elders, the Medical Association of Lesbos. He arrived in New York with nothing but those papers, his children, and the duplicate of a Paris diploma the Ministry of Public Instruction had authorized him to replace the year before.

Across that same Manhattan in those years — another house, another arrival — the Lebruns were building their own American chapter. Serge Lebrun, born in Léogâne, Haiti to a French father from Boulogne and a Haitian mother of partly German descent, came to New York as a baker, became a merchant, and ended his career as a manager at Mellon Bank. His wife Toye Chassaing Lebrun — French on both sides, with deep Haitian roots — was a seamstress for Ann Lowe (who would later make Jacqueline Bouvier's wedding gown) and for Norma Kamali. Their cousin Joe Gaetjens scored the lone goal in Haiti 1, England 0 at the 1950 World Cup, and was killed by the Duvalier regime in 1964. Boulogne to Léogâne to Jackson Heights, in three generations.

Lazaros's New York years — 1924 to his death in 1939 — were not quiet. He founded the Aletheia ("The Truth") newspaper, the principal Greek-American organ of the dissident faction opposed to Archbishop Athenagoras Spyrou's centralizing leadership of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. From his editorial office at 344 West 27th Street he ran a national subscription network reaching from the Bronx parish at 809 Westchester Avenue to clergy in Brockton, Massachusetts and Philadelphia. In November 1933 his closest clerical ally, Archimandrite Christopher Kontogeorgos, filed a criminal complaint in Chicago Municipal Court alleging Athenagoras had physically assaulted him; the judge issued a $1,000 cash-bond arrest warrant against the sitting Archbishop. Twenty-four days later, on December 2, 1933, the Aletheia Protocol was signed in Lazaros's office. Athenagoras eventually rose to be Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I; in 1965 he and Pope Paul VI lifted the mutual excommunications between Rome and Constantinople. He was not, in the end, carried away in the Aletheia campaign.

Lazaros's children carried the medical line into a second American century. Constantine — born in Mytilene, Cornell Phi Beta Kappa Class of 1937, M.D. Roma 1941 — served as a U.S. Army Medical Corps Captain in the 304th Station Hospital, married the Polish refugee physiologist Zofia Jakowska (whose own father was murdered at Majdanek), and after thirty years of Manhattan practice retired to Santo Domingo with her, where Zofia helped found the modern Dominican biological sciences. Takis took the same Faculty of Medicine of the Université de Paris his father had attended, then practiced as a general physician on Asharoken Avenue in Northport, Long Island. John Lazare served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in Strasbourg and Sousse and married Ines Valda Cicchinelli, a Sicilian-born French Resistance survivor liberated from the Wiener Neustadt subcamp of Mauthausen by Soviet forces in April 1945.

Five generations on, the household carries both lines forward. Peter, Constantine's son, retired from his own American practice. Alex — Peter's son — built systems for twenty years, runs ultramarathons, and keeps the record. Mia, Alex's daughter, founded a Florida 501(c)(3) at sixteen and is applying to college for the Class of 2027.

This site is the long-form working archive of that household — primary-source documents in Greek, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and English; person-by-person biographies as they're confirmed; the catalogued contents of a hundred-PDF batch of family papers Lazaros's grandson Peter scanned in 2010; a running ledger of open questions and corrections from living relatives. It is a record-in-progress, not a finished book. The Greek citizenship case — the family's working claim under the modern law of descent — has its own dossier page, drawing on the documents catalogued here.