Farewell...Don't Forget Me: A Hellenic-Romanian Legacy

By Ted Theodore

This memoir chronicles three southern European clans, their migration to the United States, and intertwining, as well as hard working, warm, loving, and close-knit personal values they bestowed on their kin. Their story flows across Europe and North America from the mid 19th to the late 20th centuries. Family bonds survived and strengthened despite parental and sibling deaths, boarding schools, upheavals in occupied Romania during WW I, personal tragedies, separations imposed by WW II and the Communist bloc, civil war, and financial struggles. The Theodosious present a microcosm of southern European immigration to the United States in the earliest 1900s. From seemingly endless lines of railroad track stretching out before repair gangs of excited young Greeks in their first jobs in America to opening of substantial business establishments, they were comforted in the knowledge their toils would someday benefit their progeny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456889449

Ted Theodore

Ted loves teaching the word of God and is passionate about sharing his testimony and relationship with the Lord. He is married to Rachel Smith Theodore, a full-time minister of the gospel and Head Pastor of Shepherd Place Ministries, The Hague, Netherlands, where he also serves as a deacon. They are blessed with two children – Mayo and Jemimah. He is a management consultant and an entrepreneur with a passion for helping people and organisations achieve their potential.

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Copyright © 2011 by Ted Theodore.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2011904351

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81452

"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone

monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others."

Pencles 495 BC-429 BC

DEDICATION

To Josephine Zeese Theodore,

The Last of a Generation

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1  Introduction

Chapter 2  The Extended Suga Family

Chapter3  The Panopoulos Family

Chapter4  The Extended Theodosiou Family

Chapter5  The Theodores And The Laundry Business

Chapter6  Home On North Layton Drive

Chapter7  Theodosiou To Theodore

Chapter8  Marriage And Early Years Together Of Aphrodite And George

Chapter 9  Youthful Memories Of A Theodore

Chapter 10  Aphrodite And Religion

Chapter 11  Passing Of George Theodore

Chapter 12  Passing Of Aphrodite Theodore

Chapter 13  Finale To The Alexandria Home

Chapter 14  Legacy Of Aphrodite And George

Appendix  Our Deep Ancestral Lines Of Descent

References

Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE

Do you know your family history well, reasonably well, or possibly not at all? Most people can provide, at a minimum, the most basic, highly simplified overview of their immediate ancestors … father, mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Not surprisingly, a few can even furnish family details extending three hundred years or more into the past. Of course, others, and a large number certainly fall into this category, do not want to be bothered by who or what went before them. Their only concern seems to be the present—I don’t have time for the present, let alone the past! Our curiosity along these lines finally reached a point where we hungered to learn as much as practically possible about the various lineages leading to our parents. From a somewhat different perspective, someone had to tell the story of the generations that came before us—they contributed so much, yet, when all is said and done, they were the most ordinary of an entire generation of extraordinary individuals. Their struggles and successes must be told.

It is most fitting we try to document specific contributions these individuals made to family and society. Otherwise, their feats would be lost forever to all of our succeeding generations, because their accomplishments took place during an era when over achievement seemed to be the norm and not the exception.

Over the years, the two of us gradually developed this intense curiosity about specifics in the lives of our immediate Greek and Romanian ancestors—something well beyond the tantalizing snippets told us by our parents. Could our progenitors and their lives’ struggles also reveal something about why we are who we are? Is it possible any number of events in our family history may have contributed, as well, to our psychological and emotional make-ups? To this end, we wanted to examine any circumstances that may have contributed to the How? and the Why? in the lives of our parents and grandparents. You might say we wished to somehow bring them into the present by reaching into whatever chronicles of their lives we could find. In effect, this constituted, on our part, an honoring of their memory. But it became more than just an honoring of their memory. As so eloquently stated by Contos (1994), our parents

… [are] present in [our] memory not as a sum total of all that [we] know about [them] but in all [their] living reality. Yet, on the other hand, it is this very presence that makes us feel acutely that [they] are no longer here, that never again in this world and in this life shall [we] touch [their] hands which [we] so vividly see in [our] memory. Memory is thus the most wonderful and at the same time the most tragic of all human faculties …

Admittedly, our inclinations to memorialize our forbearers came about quite incrementally as, at first, we could provide only murky partial renderings—photographically and anecdotally—even of our grandparents and much less so of our great grandparents. We did not even understand many of the subtleties of our parents coming to America, and how our parents were truly a representation of a generation of migration to the United States. We replied as best we could when asked about them by our children. However, early on we also came to realize our spotty answers were really quite unsatisfactory both to us and to our children.

Nevertheless, did something well beyond the mundane lurk deep in our southern European heritage? Something our parents and grandparents would never have imagined? Nor believed? Our tale, despite everything to the contrary, seems to point to a couple of never considered, but surprising possibilities.

Our immediate and traditional heritage, as we are about to unfold, derives from three disparate Greek-and Romanian-rooted families. Each of these families contributed equally important building blocks to our family history. Those building blocks included an extraordinary commitment to family, as well as an unremitting work ethic. Our predecessors combined the latter to an unwavering perseverance to prove themselves successful. A pivotal corollary to these qualities turned out to be the fostering of an environment where well-educated children became an overriding concern.

Our story includes three families—Suga, Panopoulos, and Theodosiou—and flows across Europe and North America from the late 19th and to the mid-20th century. Many in the three families living in the United States saw their loved ones eventually wind down their moments in time during the late 20th century. Nonetheless, numerous offspring from all three families today continue to prosper globally in the early years of the 21st century. Additionally, we hope our effort someday will inspire someone to continue this tale, perhaps filling in those gaps we have been forced to leave bare, but, most importantly, carrying on the richness of our family’s history from where we concluded. Moreover, it would add immeasurably to the accolades well deserved by all those who came before us.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

This memoir primarily involves the lineages of three southern European families, their intertwining, and their migration to the United States. Those immigrants coming during the Massive Migration have been referred to as Old Immigrants (1890-1920), as opposed to the subsequent two major pulses of Greek immigrants during the First Wave (1947-1965) and Second Wave (post 1965), the latter arriving after passage of the United States Immigration Act of 1965 (Tsemberis, 1999). In addition, those arriving from Greece during the First and Second Waves were much more highly educated than the earlier-arrived Old Immigrants. Nonetheless, the first large incursion of Greeks onto American shores occurred about 200 years earlier in the late 1760s when Dr. Andrew Turnbull established the short-lived colony of New Smyrna on a land grant in East Florida from the British government (Panagopoulos, 1978). Dr. Turnbull, who was married to a Greek woman from Smyrna in Asia Minor, began his colony primarily as an industrial enterprise with upwards of 500 Greeks; many of these early Greek immigrants originally hailed from the Peloponnesus, part of southern Greece where our father’s family had its home.

Through the first ten years of the 20th century, roughly nine million immigrants arrived in the United States, with about 70 percent of them coming from Eastern and Southern Europe by the end of the decade (Immigration in the early 1900s, Eyewitness to History, http://www. eyewitnesstohistory.com). The largest percentage of immigrants from Southern Europe (actually in terms of percent of the average yearly total) was in the time interval 1900-1914 when southern Europeans comprised 26 percent of the approximately 900,000 average yearly total coming into the country (Cohn, R.L., Immigration to the United States: http://ch.net/encyclopedia/article/cohn.immigration.us). Between 1900 and 1910, about 168,000 ethnic Greeks immigrated to the United States—some 95 percent of which were male (Moskos, 1989). This total includes only those Greeks coming from mainland Greece and the Greek Islands, however, and does not include any ethnic Greeks coming from Asia Minor. The latter comprised a significant number. Over the early years of the 20th century, many Greeks in Asia Minor sought refuge in the United States from a lack of opportunities in their mostly Greek-populated villages, and the ongoing harassment by the Muslim populace that eventually came to constitute an overwhelming majority throughout Asia Minor.

The flood of Greek arrivals into the United States prior to 1920 dispersed primarily into three parts of the country after they set out mainly from Ellis Island: (1) to the west, with its mines and railroad gangs; (2) into New England’s textile mill towns; and (3) into the major cities of the north, mostly New York and Chicago (Moskos, 1989). Upon discharge from Ellis Island, the new arrivals were ferried to Manhattan Island. Once in New York, they immediately began their quest for a job. Labor agents posted hand written notices on sidewalk chalkboards seeking workers typically by nationality; i.e., 30 Greeks, extra gang, near city, or 10 Italians, R.R. work (Iliou, 2008). All of the jobs included fares to the actual work sites.

Many Greeks went to work in the country’s mines, restaurants, and shoeshine parlors. The latter commonly employed full time many children under the ages 13 to 15. In 1904-1905, Greeks also comprised a large percentage of the underground miners at the Bingham Canyon, Utah, copper mine (Photo 1), where by 1912 the Utah Copper Company employed approximately 1,200 Greeks (Skedros, 2005), including some who were to become part of our extended family. Meanwhile, back in the large metropolitan areas of New York and Chicago, newly arrived Greeks worked largely in restaurants or as bootblacks (Photo 2). Initial capital outlays required to set up a shoeshine stand were low, and a minimal amount of background knowledge was needed. As pointed out by Thernstrom (1994), a shoeshine stand provided the perfect jumping off point for entry into a host of other occupations and business enterprises. Numerous business-related leads could be found during the course of daily conversations at the shoeshine stand. In 1908, the typical shoeshine cost five cents.

Smaller numbers of Greeks also exited into the vast expanse of the United States from entry ports other than Ellis Island. However, what is not generally appreciated is that roughly half of all Greeks who came to the United States between 1880 and 1924 settled in rural areas of the country (Frangos, 2001).

In all, approximately 26 million people left their European homes between 1880 and 1910 for either the Americas or Australasia (Keegan, 1998)—incredibly staggering numbers. It is difficult to comprehend the overall ramifications to the cohesiveness of most individual families resulting from such a massive exodus. Communications across continents were not what they are today with the universal availability of the Internet and SKYPE. Keep in mind also many of these families had been residents of their small villages and towns for many generations prior to the precipitous departure of their sons—sons who might otherwise have been called upon to continue working the family croplands.

Hatton and Williamson (1998) further suggest immigration into the United States during this period of time was influenced by five major factors: (1) differences in real wages between the United States and the immigrant’s country of origin; (2) rate of population growth during the preceding 20 or 30 years in the home country; (3) intensity of industrialization and urbanization; (4) prior number of immigrants from the home country residing in the United States; and (5) highly favorable economic and political conditions in the United States. Cohn also adds the absence of immigration restrictions into the United States to this list (Cohn, R.L., Immigration to the United States: http://eh.net/ encyclopedia/article/cohn.immigration.us). Rapid industrialization following Reconstruction after the Civil War in the United States created millions of jobs in the industrialized North—jobs that were not filled by labor pools readily available in the South, primarily because of racial bias present in the North (Georgakas, 1999).

A significant percentage of Greek immigrants, roughly 40 percent, who arrived prior to 1930 also did indeed return subsequently to their homeland provinces according to United States passport control data (Moskos, 1989). Nevertheless, these data do not differentiate between those Greeks who may have returned permanently to Greece from those who may have returned only for relatively short vacation visits. By the 1920s and 1930s, as part of an unrelenting drive to be financially successful, many Greek families had established small businesses in the United States, as well as ongoing, well-regarded school associations for their children. However, as a result of their then elevated standards of living, they factored pilgrimages back to the motherland into their way of life. They returned to the small villages and towns where they could enjoy time with mothers and fathers as well as other close family members and friends left behind. Those families returning to Greece could finally afford the luxury of international travel by ship, even though in many instances such pre-World War II travel entailed weeklong cross-country train rides to their ports of embarkation on the east coast.

As we will see below, the Suga, Panopoulos, and Theodosiou families certainly contributed much more than the typical family’s share to overall extremely high birth rates in Romania and Greece during the late 1800s and earliest 1900s. All three families were blessed with large numbers of children, probably about twice that of the average family at the time. However, Hatton and Williamson’s (1998) reason (4) listed above—the prior number of immigrants present in the United States from an individual country—could not have been an important factor that subsequently influenced emigration from Greece to the United States in the early 1900s. There simply were not that many immigrants throughout the United States who came from Greece during the last two decades of the 19th century. Nonetheless, a few local pockets of high concentrations of Greek immigrants did exist in the country beginning in the 1880s, such as the celebrated Greek sponge divers of Tarpon Springs, Florida.

Despite all of the motives listed above that may have influenced the immigrant population in general, those immigrants arriving from Greece in the early 1900s primarily were driven by an absence of economic opportunities in their villages. Economic gain was the prime motivating factor (Moskos, 2001). The desire of the Greeks to emigrate was augmented by the enticement of well-paying jobs in the United States offered primarily by labor recruiting agents, and less so by padrones or managers of various business establishments. Certainly, a high birth rate in the villages during this era also was one of the major contributing factors for the young labor force to seek jobs outside their villages. Once in the United States, however, Greeks did not remain static. They moved with the availability of jobs. The first large group of Greeks to come west from the east coast of the United States came as strikebreakers into Utah in 1903 (Moskos, 2001).

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Photo 1. Greek miners in 1904-1905 at Bingham Canyon, Utah mine portal. Photo modified from Skedros (2005).

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Photo 2. Greek-owned bootblack stand.

Yes, eventually many immigrants may have flourished highly relative to their forsaken European economic standings, but our forbearers’ lives in the United States definitely were not always materially golden. Their lives were punctuated by never ending struggles to subsist, to better themselves, and to educate their children. Their struggles definitely were exacerbated by a number of severe economic depressions that affected the country over their lifetimes. Along the way, sources of income also were lost periodically for various reasons besides the economic depressions. In time, though, most of their treasures came to be measured by many intangibles other than the trappings typically associated with the leisured lives of old money. If their children achieved an economic and educational status better than the immigrants’, this then served as their treasure. It remained for our generation and the children of our generation finally to achieve much of the sustained financial breathing room our parents so desperately sought. These progeny accomplished this through wide ranging professional and commercial successes.

With this family memoir, we hope all our early 21st century, second generation southern European brothers and sisters in America will some day recognize how the complexities of their multicultural backgrounds contributed to what they have become or ultimately will become. Many have already done so. We further hope anyone even remotely related to these three families will derive an added sense of appreciation of their ancestors’ toils and sacrifices as they wend their way through the unfolding of this tale. In a sense, this memorial account allowed us finally—and we also should emphasize quite belatedly—to recognize and to appreciate a number of subtle yet almost predetermined ancestral influences from our forbearers that have touched our psyches deeply. After reaching well into the many nooks and crannies of our labyrinthine past, we now have come to understand how our very personalities, our very beings, and, yes, even some of our personal and physical traits were preordained and preconditioned to a substantial degree by events and family members far in our past. Lastly, we hope the Romanian essence of our family history adds a desirable body of work to the extensive sociological histories documenting the early 20th century massive migration of Greeks to our shores.

On the one hand, as we shall see shortly, the three families we follow are noteworthy, yet on the other, they really are quite ordinary for their time as they grew and evolved. Initial expansion in each of the three families, though, occurred independent of, and well apart from, the others in Greece and Romania. Although the Panopoulos and Theodosiou families originally emerged from the same general Peloponnesian region of southern Greece, those two families eventually came together in the United States through the arranged marriage of our parents. As we shall further see, such family-arranged unions at the time were much more common than many realize today—in fact, they were the norm! In somewhat of a historical look back at our upbringing, we can now assert quite assuredly the union of our parents was decidedly successful, though it did face the typical number of dilemmas and challenges. However, many such marriages were not successful (Papanikolas, 2002).

We finally sought out the specifics of our family history only after our adult children asked some probing and thought-provoking questions. They eagerly desired further clarification of the genealogical histories of their grandparents’ families, in part prompted by a recently completed biography of Dolores (nee Fuentes) Theodore, Ted’s beloved and deceased spouse (Theodore, 2007). In essence, our children wanted to learn more about their ancestral lineages. Where did our parents originate? What were their lives’ circumstances like in Europe, as well as those of their parents? When and why did our parents and their many siblings come to the United States? What was the financial situation of their early years here? Why and when did our father and his brothers change their surname to Theodore? How many long-misplaced, distant cousins do we still have in Europe, and who are they? What do they do? Finally, how many generations can we comfortably take our lineages back into the past on the basis of any existing documents and oral histories?

Without a doubt we focus the beginning of this tale on our Romanian maternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Ekaterina Suga. Much if not all that we are about to relate either emanates from or is a direct consequence of her fleeting life. At the time of her marriage in 1901, Ekaterina was a beautiful woman in her late teens. She came from a small village in Romania a little ways outside Bucharest, where she was one of 11 children. Her Suga family thus makes up the first of the three families we follow.

After a short courtship, our grandfather Theodore Panopoulos, entered the Suga family inner circle, first becoming betrothed to and finally marrying Ekaterina Suga. He was a young Greek immigrant living and working in Romania. Accordingly, his Panopoulos family, though originally rooted in southern Greece, makes up the second family we track closely. Regrettably, Ekaterina and Theodore’s marriage lasted only six years, because of her unanticipated, shockingly sudden death. Ekaterina and Theodore, nonetheless, had four children before her untimely passing. As we are about to see, the eldest of those four children came to be our mother many adventurous years later—years packed with numerous crossroads, crises, and calamities.

Finally, the third family we consider in detail is our father’s, the Theodosiou family from southern Greece, a large number of which came to the United States. Our father arrived during the opening decade of the 20th century. Surprisingly, our branch of the Theodosious may have some extremely deep ancestral roots well outside Greece. In all honesty, though, we really are obligated here to emphasize the word may quite strongly. Among a myriad of possibilities, our Theodosiou family may owe the deep-seated genetic signatures of its males to either (1) Scythian Archers dating from as far back as the Golden Age of Greece around the 5th century B.C., or (2) a bloodline of Norse-related Varangian precursors who came into the eastern Mediterranean and western Black Sea regions during the 11th century A.D. As we expand upon fully in the Appendix of this memoir, these two possibilities form the extraordinary underpinnings that may underlie our origins.

Still, let’s take a look at what we know for sure about the immediate circumstances surrounding the Theodosiou family.

In all, five Theodosiou siblings emigrated from Greece to the United States during and shortly after the 1880-1924 Massive Migration out of Europe. The first three Theodosiou brothers actually came between 1900 and 1907. They were poor and unpretentious jobseekers among the millions of immigrants from southern Europe streaming through Ellis Island. About 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island during its 62 years of operation. A relatively small number, about 3,000, unfortunately also killed themselves on the island when they realized their entry into the United States was being denied—denials mostly on the basis of some medical condition (Pappas, 2001). Poor really is an understatement as applied to the three Theodosiou brothers. They had absolutely nothing. In due course though, the three prospered, as did many others.

Yet, as an integral part of that prosperity, the eldest of the Theodosiou siblings, who was the first to come in 1900, also was the first to evolve his family name and informally adopt a new surname or alias, Theodore. At the time, Anglicizing of foreign sounding surnames was carried out widely by the immigrants themselves both to set aside the prejudices of a xenophobic Anglo-dominant society, as well as to gain its favor. In reality, their name changing constituted one of the first acts of assimilation into a soon-to-be-adopted American culture. That first Theodosiou family member to arrive in the United States was to be one of our uncles many years later. He was the oldest of eight children in a family that originally depended on the land for its livelihood in southern Greece.

Arrivals in the United States of the four additional Theodosious took place over a time span of more than 25 years. Following our uncle’s lead, his next two younger brothers shortly followed in 1905 and 1907. Immediately upon their reaching America, these two also became Theodores. The Theodosiou brother who arrived in 1907 became our father some 30 plus years later. Nevertheless, in a surprisingly few number of years after their arrival, the three brothers formed a successful partnership, and they turned into financially well-entrenched business proprietors. Later on, two more of their siblings were brought by the three brothers to the United States in the 1920s, a sister and a brother, who were the last of the Theodosiou family to reach here as permanent residents.

Though the Theodosiou family name may have disappeared from our lineage owing to its Anglicization, one thing the Theodosious refused to Anglicize was their religious birthright. In fact, Greek immigrants, in general, brought the Greek Orthodox religion with its unbroken Apostolic succession to wherever they set up permanent residence throughout the United States. They did this by way of the numerous churches they built and supported. Today (2011), approximately 70 percent of Greek Orthodox liturgies in the United States are conducted in English (Fr. Peter Salmas, written commun., 2010). Nonetheless, the quintessence of the Orthodox divine Eucharistic Liturgy of St. John Chrysostomos remains essentially the same as it was first celebrated some 1,700 years ago. While our forbearers maintained extremely close ties to the Orthodox faith, their 21st century, offspring have come to worship with a mixed fervor. On the one hand, many do this in a variety of religious denominations, primarily because of non-Orthodox spouses they chose. On the other, many non-Greek and non-Romanian spouses of those offspring, upon Chrismation or Baptism into Orthodoxy, became exemplary, devout churchgoers.

In essence, those five Theodosiou siblings can now retrospectively be viewed as a microcosm of southern European immigration into the United States—they provide a perfect example of how those who contributed to the early growth of this great country grew and flourished in the early 1900s and beyond. Thankfully, they also provide us with a look into how warm, loving, and close-knit extended families, well rooted in the importance of stable family upbringings, can and should develop and go forward as the years march by.

So, how did our mother enter into the picture?

As a result of a family-agreed-to prenuptial arrangement, our mother, the eldest daughter in the Greek-Romanian Panopoulos household, came to the United States in the mid 1930s after a trying and event-packed early childhood. We might add Mother wholeheartedly agreed to her arranged marriage—she was not coerced at all, as is readily apparent from correspondence included below prior to marriage with our father. She came specifically to marry the third of those newly re-labeled Theodore brothers to arrive here. Consequently, Mother followed the arrival of our father by about 28 years. She, in turn, was a quiet, unassuming, but well-lettered woman, who in her adulthood became an important member of what subsequently was to expand from those five siblings into the succeeding large, dynamic, and multifaceted Theodore family, now (2011) spread widely across the country.

More to the point in this memoir, as greater than 65-year-old young minds belonging to second generation, United States-born Greek-Romanians, we examine important aspects of our familial, cultural, and genealogical ancestries. Well … at least the two of us maintain our minds are still young, though our children might take issue with this statement. Do not bother to even think about what our bodies have deteriorated to. Yet, rather than restrict this work to a simple chronologic memoir or cataloging of events and people, we decided to interject considerable analysis and introspection throughout so that we might extract fairly reasonable implications from the, at times, scanty materials and primary documentation of our family history arrayed before us. Nonetheless, whatever conjectures we have made, we believe they have been done sensibly in order to not stretch our interpretations beyond reason. To a degree, we do this to amplify as much as possible our tributes to our parents and to the many members of their immediate families. Again, they came to the United States as penniless immigrants and succeeded. Without a doubt, they truly succeeded, but they also experienced a number of personal heartbreaks as their lives pressed on fruitfully, and finally came to peaceful conclusions during the latter part of the 20th century.

They lived their lives simply, genuinely, honestly, and openly. As they passed on, their many achievements may not have been known widely, nor did they come close to some sort of heralding beyond their peers whose numbers also were rapidly declining as the years took their toll. Their final rites were quiet and subdued; milling crowds were not there to armor somber drives to final resting places. Yet, these lives did produce a number of measurable achievements, and, most importantly, a broad spectrum of less definable, but long lasting successes.

Our parents, aunts, and uncles would have smiled with a sense of deep inward satisfaction at whatever small contribution they made to some abstract global statistic measuring the steady upward mobility of foreign-born Greeks in the United States. This upward mobility came about as they moved from day laborers or working class into the pre-World War II small business, middle class. But they would have reserved their greatest sense of satisfaction in seeing their children, and their grandchildren and beyond, soar to professional and societal heights. As noted by Georgakas (2001), second generation Greek-Americans became among the most highly educated and prosperous of all second generation Americans. They accomplished this primarily because of exemplary loving families. Unquestionably, the loving families’ part was among the most important contributing factors. Those now widespread family households also are a direct consequence of our second generation’s good fortune, for the most part, in being rooted in family environments that provided a number of foundations—financial and otherwise—for the succeeding age bands to build upon. Our second generation, as well as all succeeding generations after us, owe an immense sense of gratitude to the self-sacrifice that was the heraldic mark of that first-generation’s toils in their new American surroundings.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the two of us have inevitably come to represent a sharply declining ethnic group, as year-to-year immigration into the United States from many other parts of the world—mostly Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East—percentagewise overwhelmed that coming from Southern Europe. In 1907, immigrants from Western Europe made up approximately 75 percent of the foreign-born residents of the United States, whereas in 2007, they comprised only about 10 percent of the foreign-born residents (Thompson, 2009). As a further example of the continuing decline of the proportion of southern Europeans in the United States, an estimated 350,000 second-generation Greek-Americans (i.e., those born in the United States of foreign-born Greek parents) were present in the country in the early 1990s (Barkan, 1999). This group constituted barely about a tenth of a percent of the total population of the country in 2009. An estimated 33.5 million foreign-born residents were present in the United States during 2003, the last year for which reliable data are available (http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/p20-551.pdf). Second-generation Americans of Greek-Romanian ancestry undoubtedly must represent miniscule percentages of the total population.

Some authors, as a matter of fact, probably would prefer to view us not so expressly related to specific ethnic groups, but would rather view us somewhat more generally as Euro-Americans (Home, 1995). Nonetheless, according to the 2000