Eftyhia (Ευτυχία, “good fortune”) was the mother of the six known Jeannopoulos siblings of Alex’s grandfather Constantine’s generation. Two of her children — John Lazare (b. March 15, 1911 actual; falsified to 1913 by Eftyhia) and Takis (b. November 18, 1911) — were born in Soma, Turkey, where the family was rooted before the 1922 Asia Minor catastrophe drove them via Mytilene to the United States.
Her maiden name Karamitrou (Καραμήτρου) surfaced in May 2026 from an online Social Security Death Index archive entry for her son Achilles, which lists “Eftihia Karamitrou (mother).” The base surname is Karamitros — an Asia Minor Greek name (the “Kara-” prefix is Turkish-origin “black,” a common Anatolian-Greek pattern). This is the entry point to her parents’ generation, previously unknown.
Recorded across documents under several transliterations — Eftyhia (family memory), Eftimia (SS Themistocles 1924 inspection card), Eftihia (the Karamitrou archive entry) — all the same Greek name Ευτυχία.
Per her granddaughter Aline (May 2026), Eftyhia was an actively protective matriarch who falsified her firstborn son John Lazare’s birth year from 1911 to 1913 to shield him from military conscription, sustaining the lie across decades and into the US records chain. She was also at the center of the 1924–25 family crisis when John and Takis ran away to Greece — posting newspaper notices in NYC and dealing with a fake ransom note before the boys were brought back.
Her own voice
A two-page letter in Eftyhia’s own hand survives in the family archive, signed “Με πολλά αγία / Ευτυχία Γιαννοπούλου” (With much love, Eftychia Yannopoulou). She writes about her children, naming all five in maternal diminutives — Παναγιωτάκης (Takis), Γιάννος (John), Κωσταμή μου (“my little Kostas” = Constantine), Αχιλλάκη (little Achilles), and Μαριτσούλα μου (“my little Maria”). The letter discusses their daily care (warming milk, evening routines), dollar transactions sent to Greece, and ends with the line “Write to me about my children, my beautiful own ones…”
It is the first primary-source document we have written by Eftyhia herself.
Her Pergamene family
Eftyhia was born in Pergamos / Bergama. Her family — the Karamitrou line — were Pergamene Greeks displaced in the same 1922 expulsion that took the Jeannopoulos household out of Soma. Her father, Sofianos Karamitrou, was a Pergamon-area landowner; from New York Lazaros pursued formal Greek-state compensation claims for the lost Bergama property in parallel with his own Soma estate, working through correspondents in Mytilene and Piraeus through the late 1920s.
Decades later, a 1978 circular from the Athens Association of Pergamenes “Attalos” — a Pergamene-diaspora memorial association — reached the family archive. Its President was a man named Attalos Karamitros: same surname as Eftyhia (in its masculine form), Pergamene leadership role, first name “Attalos” deliberately echoing the ancient Pergamene Attalid kings. He was almost certainly a Karamitrou relative. The mailing was addressed at the period Constantine was living in Santo Domingo, which suggests Constantine maintained contact with his maternal Pergamene cousins through to the end of his life.
