family

Family record

Refugees from two worlds, on Alex's side of the family — kept as two records. Jeannopoulos got out of Anatolia in 1922 by way of Mytilene; Lebrun and Chassaing out of Port-au-Prince in the late 1960s. Karyn's Haitian side — Lefèvre and Osias — is not yet documented here. This is a working record: facts where documents support them, family memory where they don't, open questions marked on each person's page.

Greek, from Asia Minor

Jeannopoulos

Refugees from Anatolia in the 1922 catastrophe, by way of Smyrna and Mytilene, who rebuilt in New York.

37 people

Haitian, from Port-au-Prince

Lebrun

From Turgeau in Port-au-Prince to Jackson Heights, Queens — with a French and Belgian trail running back to Paris.

42 people

The name itself carries a small story. Jeannopoulos is the Greek Ιωαννόπουλος — "son of John," the Greek Johnson — but spelled with the French Jean, a trace of the family's Paris medical schooling and the Francophone world of the Smyrna Greeks. How the name got its French spelling →