A French-language certificate issued August 28, 1931, in New York City by Archimandrite Christophore Kontogeorgos — “former priest of the Greek Community of Soma in Asia Minor.” The body:
“I the undersigned Archimandrite Christophore Kontogeorgos, former priest of the Greek Community of Soma in Asia Minor, certify that Jean L. Jeannopoulos was born in Soma on March 17, 1911 and was baptized according to the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church.”
Below the priest’s signature, Saint Francisque Kallistos (a New York sworn translator) certified the authenticity of the signature the same day. The whole document was then notarized on September 9, 1931 by NYC Commissioner of Deeds Evagelos Kylsanee, with a Greek Orthodox parish stamp affixed.
The certificate is the primary-source ecclesiastical record of John Lazare’s birth — the John Lazare equivalent of Constantine’s 1923 parish baptismal certificate. Both documents work the same way: a former Soma parish priest vouches for a birth where no civil registry record existed (the “there was no civil-registry act and we necessarily resorted to priests” line from the 1937 Mytilene law-office letter applies to John as well as to Constantine).
It also definitively settles John’s actual year of birth as 1911, not 1913 as US records show. John’s mother Eftyhia had falsified his birth year by two years — recording him as born March 15, 1913 on US documents — to keep him out of Ottoman, Greek, or Balkan-Wars-era military conscription. This 1931 priest’s certificate is independent confirmation of the 1911 truth, alongside John’s daughter Aline’s family-memory testimony in 2026.
The day-of-month difference (March 17 here vs Aline’s recollection of March 15) is a small discrepancy. The 1931 certificate is the contemporaneous primary source.
The certificate was prepared 7 weeks after Lazaros’s July 9, 1931 US naturalization — the timing suggests it was assembled either as part of John’s own derivative-citizenship paperwork (he had been a US resident as a minor when Lazaros naturalized) or for John’s upcoming Paris medical school enrollment in 1931, where he would need Greek-state proof of birth and baptism.