Achilles Lazare Jeannopoulos was born in Smyrna on January 20, 1920 — two years before the 1922 Asia Minor catastrophe drove the family out. He was the only one of his siblings to fully anglicize his name, becoming Alfred A. Johnson in adult life. The translation is literal: Ιωαννόπουλος (Ioannopoulos) means “son of John,” and Johnson is the direct English equivalent. He understood his own name and chose to render it precisely into English.
Per the Social Security Death Index archive entry surfaced in May 2026, he carried four legal name variants — Achilles Lazare Jeannopoulos, Achilles Jeannopoulos, Alfred Achilles Johnson (a transitional form preserving the Greek middle), and finally Alfred A. Johnson — all tied to a single SSN, 065-24-5702 (issued in New York State). The same archive entry was also the source that resolved his mother’s maiden name as Karamitrou.
He was a physician (MD) — one of the four Jeannopoulos brothers who all became doctors (Constantine, Takis, John Lazare, Achilles). He lived his whole adult life in Manhattan, ending in the Upper East Side / Lenox Hill area (ZIP 10021). He died on January 22, 2004, two days after his 84th birthday — and nine days before his brother John Lazare, who died on January 31, 2004. With Achilles’s death, the last of the Anatolia-born Jeannopoulos siblings closed out (Constantine had died 1980, the others earlier or in 1980 alongside).
The “why he anglicized” question is open. A mid-century NYC MD building a practice may have judged an Anglo name as commercially safer; his sibling Constantine kept Jeannopoulos through a comparable medical career. Aline (his niece) may be able to clarify.
