Swirly lime-green froth
washes old pixels away.
Sunny new home page.

It’s not the best haiku to celebrate the latest fufurasu.org redesign, but it will do.

While I was in Greece I expressed my desire to know more about my ancestry to my father and my maternal uncle. They were both keen to contribute to research in this direction. They also confirmed my suspicions regarding a possible problem with gathering genealogical information for Greek lineages: lack of records. Where records were kept, they were often lost in the frequent wars and upheavals that plague the recent history of Greece. Still, my father and uncle do have information to share.

Most interestingly, my father explained that I am in only the second generation of people born with the surname Chouchoulas (pronounced HOO-hoo-las). My grandfather Angelis was born Dimitrakopoulos, a much more common Greek surname. After municipal records were destroyed in WWII the task to recreate them was shouldered by priests of limited education who used nicknames in place of surnames. My grandfather’s nickname was “choúchoulas” after the “Chouchouléika” the common name of the hill where his house was. The owl-infested hill was named after the sound the birds make (hoo-hoo, I guess). I also learned that my grandfather’s brother emigrated to the US and shortened his name to Poulos, to become one of the many Pouloses there. I will make an effort to record all this data systematically in the near future.