Twice My Child: The Stories of Five Generations of Island Women

"My child's child is twice my child," I heard my mother, Maria, say in Greek, her only language, in referring to her English-speaking grandchildren. She had heard these same words from my grandmother and my grandmother heard them from her grandmother, back through the generations of my Greek island origins. Who were these strong women, who maintained family continuity and identity through the turbulence that dramatically changed the face of Greece through the 19th and 20th Centuries? My story follows them, three named Triantafyllia, my given name, and two named Maria, my mother's name, from the Ottoman occupied island of Tinos in the Aegean Sea in 1790 to the American Midwest at the end of the 20th Century. Heritage is important in understanding how and why family identity survives war, social upheaval, immigration and assimilation. The strong women who preceded me passed down the will and the way to accomplish this. I pass the story of their heritage on to Kate, Elizabeth, Paul and Kane, twice my children, and to others who are trying to shine a light on their dimming origins in order to illuminate their futures.

Philia Geotes Hayes was baptized Triantafyllia Tziotis in Athens, Greece in 1940. She was six-years-old when her family fled the Greek Civil War that followed on the heels of WW II. Her Greek Orthodox priest father served parishes in the Midwest, where she grew up. She and her husband, Paul, raised two sons, Nicholas and John, in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Now retired, she concentrates her time on her grandchildren, her research into her Greek roots, writing and her volunteer activities. She visits relatives and friends in Greece frequently.