The past waits patiently

PHOTOGRAPH: Horses at Buckleboo Station.

Nothing has happened and all is quiet. I have not had time to do any more research, nor to read any more books. Neither for that matter have I managed to begin Greek classes.

Not that it matters. The past waits patiently for the present to catch up with it. If indeed the past is meant to catch up with the present.

Ancestry research is like having someone drop a heap of jigsaw pieces onto the table and slowly having to sift through them to create the picture, knowing, as one does, that a lot of the pieces have yet to be delivered and some may never arrive.
Is it worth creating the picture? I think it is. Unfinished it may remain but without putting the pieces together which one possesses there would be no image in the first place. And, in the process of research, one makes contact with long lost stories, photos and people. In putting together the past we create a new future.

My brother Ken went to Hamley Bridge last week and took photographs of Auntie Teeny's old house. It has been repainted and the sleep-out ... and no doubt all the enormous spiders.... has gone, but it looks the same. It doesn't feel the same though. This house, which is revealed in the current photographs looks brighter and more solid. Perhaps the images I have retained in my mind of the old house had more to do with how it felt than how it looked. It is so often the way with memories.

In this process of excavating the past I have made contact with numerous long-lost cousins; first, second and third cousins. What would my great-grandparents have thought of Facebook, or email, or search engines? They would probably have adapted just as they had to adapt as immigrants to a new and unforgiving land.

Circumstances may differ but people remain relatively constant in nature. We assume a lot when we think that our ancestors were so very different. They may have lived by different values but human responses remain consistent.

When the world shook literally and metaphorically

PHOTO: Damaged chimney on a building in Adelaide after the 1954 earthquake.

I am reading Britain’s Greek Islands, Kythera and the Ionian Islands 1809 to 1864, by Peter Prineas. In the book he talks about a public school where children are taught ancient and modern Greek, Latin, French and Italian.

I realise this may well be where Charlie Ross’s ‘five languages’ came from. He of course also spoke English. I had presumed that he had picked up languages as a sailor but this is not very realistic given the fact that a ship would have one spoken language and time in port would generally be brief.

However, if he had been educated on Ithaca there is every chance that even by the mid-19^th century when he was born; public schools would be teaching more than one language as well as writing and arithmetic.

It seems odd to think that there were 100 years, give or take a few months, between my birth in September, 1949 and that of Charlie Ross in January, 1849. How the world changed in that time and how much it has changed in the 103 years since his death.

We were both born at a time which led the way to new freedoms. For me it was the beginning of the baby boomer years which brought massive change after the Second World War. And, in the year before Charlie was born people all over Europe were rising up to demand constitutional and liberal governments. The movement spread to the Ionian Islands with various revolts occurring during 1848-49 which would ultimately lead the way to reforms including press freedom, and changes to the process of Government budgets, expenditure and elections. The secret ballot would be re-instated and jury trials would be required for political offences.

Finally, when Charlie Ross was fourteen, the treaty of London, allowed the union of the island with the rest of the Greek state. The resolution of London, in 1863 stated: ‘The islands of Corfu, Kefalonia, Ithaca, Zakynthos, Lefkas, Kythera, Paxi are united with the Kingdom of Greece, and comprise an inseparable part of it, in one and indivisible State under the constitutional sceptre of the King of Greece, George A' and his heirs.’

I am sure there were celebrations and Charlie Ross and his family took part. How long it would be before he left his island home forever, I cannot know, but perhaps even at fourteen he was dreaming of the world beyond his small island. Or perhaps there was a family tradition where sons went to sea. He may already have been at sea because in times past boys could be apprenticed or indentured before they were twelve.

There is so much that I cannot know, and may never know, and so much that he would never know. He would never know that within 90 years of these joyful celebrations, much of the island would be destroyed in a terrible earthquake. The villages and towns which Charlie Ross would have known and the streets he walked no longer exist. Most of the buildings on Ithaca are no older than 50 years.

The earthquake of 1953, which reached 7.2 on the Richter scale, destroyed almost all of the homes on Ithaca. There were few exceptions, the Drakoulis mansion being one of them. Entire towns and villages of Ithaca were razed to the ground and hundreds perished ... no doubt, amongst them, distant relatives of Charlie Ross.

The earthquake hit at midday on August 12 when people were preparing lunchtime meals and this meant that fires spread quickly. It must have been a scene of utter carnage and in the aftermath of the quake more than 70 percent of the buildings of Ithaca were demolished and replaced. The earthquake also brought a new wave of emigration and countless residents left Ithaca, just as Charlie Ross had done, to start a new life elsewhere.

Ithaca, known as a sleepy, rocky little island - Homer called it 'good for goats' - was awakened with shocking force and would never be the same again. I was four, nearly five, when Ithaca was ruined by the massive earthquake and would have known nothing of it... and no doubt, neither would my parents who were not great newspaper readers at the best of times.

But there was a connection because, just over six months later, on March 1, 1954, Adelaide, like most of Australia, never prone to large earthquakes, was hit by its biggest quake ever - registering 5.4 on the Richter scale. The damage was severe, and has been estimated, should it happen again, to cost $1billion in today’s money.

But the damage done to Adelaide was nothing like the damage to Ithaca and other Ionian Islands. No-one died in Adelaide for instance and only three people were injured. And, unlike Ithaca, no-one was made homeless or forced to leave their country for a better life elsewhere. The Australian Government recorded that the earthquake, which lasted for 20-30 seconds, damaged 3,000 buildings including collapsed and cracked walls, smashed chimneys and broken windows.

It hit around 3.45 in the early hours of the morning, causing some metropolitan black-outs for up to two hours; radio stations to be cut off and the movement of parapets in some buildings by as much as two inches.

I, however, the good sleeper that I was and remain, slept peacefully through it all and knew nothing until the morning. My only memory of the quake was the trail of broken crockery in the kitchen from where dishes had been shaken off the dresser.

But Ithaca suffered far more than a few bits of broken crockery. The earthquake of 1953 also destroyed many records so there is even less chance that when I get to Ithaca, there will be much to find. However, ‘long shots’ are the life blood of family ancestry research and part of the fun of it all.

Waiting, waiting and more waiting

And even as I begin this post an email arrives. It is from a local historian in Victoria where apparently, national aliens and deserters records are held.

Because I do not live in Victoria she has very kindly done a search. I am eternally grateful. It may lead nowhere but then again it might.

We have a C. Ross, A.B.(presumably meaning Able Bodied), deserted 2/1/1881 from the ship ‘Fron Crag’. This is nearly eight years before he married Mary Atkins but it is the best I have for the moment. I shall have to do some searching into the Fron Crag. It really is a long shot but any shot is better than no shot at all. It may not even be from the South Australian archives.

And the first thing I discover is that it is very likely there was an Iron Crag and Fron Crag is a typographical error. Such is the way of things with family research. The Iron Crag was an iron barque built by the Whitehaven Ship Building Company in December 1877 and she was posted as missing in the Liverpool Mercury newspaper, on Friday, April 19, 1895. That’s 115 years ago in a week’s time. She had left Manta, Ecuador on October 3, 1894, with a cargo of ivory nuts in bulk and bags headed for Hamburg. She was seen by another ship on January 28, 1895, some 800 miles off the English Channel and then she disappeared. Some 18 persons were on board. Her journey from London had taken her to Brisbane and Newcastle before Ecuador.

I may be wrong but my instinct is that the date of 1881 is too early for Charlie Ross. But then who knows? My next step is to do some research on aliens and deserters through the South Australian Genealogy society.

Beyond that not a lot seems to be happening but then I have not had time to do much research or follow-up. I did get in touch with some Simper relatives through Facebook and sent on to them photos that I had of their grandfather and great-grandfather, Laurie Simper.

Nothing has come of my other 'feelers' and I shall have to ring the Greek Orthodox Church to see if I can track down cousin David Ross, our Greek Orthodox monk.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

It's the little things, often not crucial to the core of the research, which bring the past alive.

Amongst the photos which Cousin Spike has sent to me is one of the headstone on the grave of Charles Harold Simper, the first husband of my paternal grandmother, Hilda Rose (Jones) Ross. Charles Harold was born at Drouin, Victoria in 1885 and married Hilda Rose at the Christian Chapel, Grote Street in Adelaide on September 11, 1912.

What struck me, looking at the photo, was that there were two engravings on the tombstone. The top recorded the death of Charles Harold and the bottom engraving recorded that his brother-in-law, Robert Jones Jr. had been buried with him. Charles died on October 2, 1914 at the age of 28 and young Robert died of cancer some three years later on August 8, 1917 at the age of fifteen years and nine months.

It was, at the time that I pondered this, yet another diversion amongst many on the path but it seemed odd that the two of them should be buried together and curiosity got the better of me. My assumption, there we go again, assumptions, assumptions, assumptions was that perhaps Charles Simper died in the early years of the First World War but research quickly revealed it was unlikely because the first Australian soldiers joined up in August of 1914 and the fighting did not begin until 1915.

Once again it has been Cousin Spike to the rescue. I queried the headstone and he sent me an extract he had found in the Adelaide newspaper, The Advertiser:

SUDDEN DEATH

On Friday afternoon Mr H. Bell of the General Havelock Hotel, hutt Street, notified the police that Mr Harold Simper, 28 years of age, residing at Keswick, had dropped dead in the yard of the hotel while conversing with residents of the hotel. He was employed at Messrs. Humphris & Co., cordial factory, in Carrington street. He had had lunch at the residence of his father (Mr Samuel Simper) Carrington Street, and had then walked to the General Havelock Hotel to meet some friends. Dr. Brown of Hutt Street, pronounced life to be extinct. The City Coroner considered an inquest unnecessary.

So, my grandmother was a widow with a small son at the age of 21. By the time that her young brother died, nearly three years later she was just three weeks away from marrying Charles Vangelios Ross. One assumes, and this is probably a safe assumption, that she had purchased a gravesite for Charles Harold Simper which would have room for herself when the time came. But circumstances change and with her life set to begin with another Charles and a new husband, she chose to give the place to her parents to use for their teenage son. No doubt it saved them money and made use of a burial place for which Hilda Rose Jones Simper, about to be Ross, had no use. Another, more poignant fact which came up, was that Robert Jones Jnr. died the day Charles Harold and Hilda Rose’s son, Laurence Gordon Murray Simper, turned four.

I could not help but think how traumatic that first loss must have been for her. We don’t expect young men in the prime of life to drop dead, but clearly they do. She had been married at 19 and barely two years and one month later she was a widow with a 14-month-old son to raise. No doubt she would have had the support of her large family but that too is an assumption.

And she must have grieved, for it was three years before she married again. Then again, I have no idea when she met Charles Vangelios, although given the times, I doubt that any serious relationship would have gone on for too long before marriage. In those days a ‘widow’ would quickly gain a bad reputation if she spent time with a single man. I am guessing that she grieved for more than two years and fell in love sometime in 1917.

But with her young brother Robert seriously ill, who can say how long it was that she and Charles Vangelios knew and loved each other? She married my grandfather a few weeks after Robert Jones Jnr died so perhaps they had known each other for many months. I doubt she would have given away her place with Charles Simper without thinking about it long and hard.

I still think she must have loved Charles Simper deeply. To all intents and purposes, from what I have been told, Charles Vangelios raised Laurie as his own son and the two had a deep and loving bond .... but Laurie retained his father’s name. It would have been easy enough for his step-father to have adopted him, given how young he was when his mother remarried. Perhaps Hilda Rose was determined that Laurie would remain a Simper in honour of his father.

Another possibility is that the Simpers of Carrington Street were much wealthier than Hilda Rose .... mind you, they wouldn't need much money to be 'much wealthier'.... and they helped to support her and her son as long as he remained a Simper. There is no doubt that the headstone erected for Charles Harold, the third-born son of Samuel and Caroline Maria (Bennett) Simper was impressive, and no doubt expensive, for the times.

Or perhaps Hilda Rose felt guilty marrying again. After all, she had buried her first husband in a double grave and must, at the time, have loved him enough to want to be buried with him.

I remember my grandmother as a strong woman with a forceful personality. These were traits which, if they did not come naturally, she would have had to learn at a very young age. Clearly she was strong enough to raise a child alone for three years in a time when women were expected to be dependent upon their husbands or their family.

When Charles Vangelios died in 1955 at the age of 63, Hilda Rose said to her daughter Jessie: ‘Death is just so final!’ Three years later, at the age of 66, she also took that very final step.

It is the small, sad stories which bring the dead to life. Needless to say, I ended up close to tears after this exercise in trawling the realms of the dead. Perhaps photographs of gravestones, particularly neglected ones, are a sharp reminder of the impermanence and unpredictability of life. And whether or not it is the ‘good who die young’ I think we are all touched more powerfully by the death of the young.

Then again, I am 60 and I certainly do not feel old, but my grandmother seemed so very, very old when she died at the age of 66. Although, when you are nine, everyone over the age of 20 seems very, very old. Although I would have to ask a nine-year old today if that remains true. Perhaps in those days people ‘got older’ faster or acted older sooner? I like the story about the people on a Japanese island who are not allowed to say they are old until they are in their 90’s and where people regularly live a decade or more beyond 100 years. We are what we think and the stories that we tell ourselves will create who we are and how we live.

Not that I have much of an idea of stories which Hilda Rose may have told herself. I remember my grandmother reasonably well because we lived with her for three years after she became a widow for the second time but it is only in tracing the ephemeral threads of the story of her life that I can understand her in any way, and by extension, my family.

But it is hard enough to gather stories about my grandparents let alone my great-grandparents. Perhaps it is enough to simply try. In this enormous jigsaw puzzle which is ancestry research there will always be shadowy ‘holes’ but hopefully, when it is completed, enough of a ‘picture’ to stand as a recognisable image.

And connections are made which are interesting. Pondering it all later, it occurred to me that my family has a long lineage of step-children. For instance, Mary’s Ross’s father, Edward Atkins married Elizabeth (Mashford) Lewis who had been previously married and who had a son, George; Mary's two sons, Charles Vangelios and Chrysantheous Christus both married women who already had a child; my brother Ken has a step-daughter; my nephew Scott has a step-daughter ; my daughter, Morgan has a step-daughter and my grandmother, Hilda Rose had a half-sister. Her mother, Florina Muirhead, had a six-month-old daughter, when she married Robert Jones in the Registry Office in Adelaide. Robert adopted Euphemia Isabell May (Adams) shortly after the marriage. I also have a vague recollection that one or more of my cousins married partners who already had a child and there were a few rumours, from the more distant past, that marriages had taken place because an aunt or great-aunt was pregnant to someone else.

It does not mean anything of great import but in four out of the past five generations of my family there have been step-children. These days step-children are fairly common and perhaps what this connection teaches is that they always have been. Although in the past the cause would have been death rather than divorce and occasionally, an unexpected pregnancy and an accommodating suitor.

Someone somewhere knows something .... I just have to find them ... or they have to find me.

PHOTO LEFT: Gladstone after the 1941 floods. Cleaning up outside the Booyoolie Hotel.

Well, I think we are in waiting mode given that I cannot access records until I am back in Adelaide and there isn’t much more I can do in terms of sending out ‘feelers’.

I have written to the Greek Orthodox Church asking about David Ross and now must wait for a response either in the negative or the positive. Assuming of course there is a response. The fallback position will be to telephone. There can’t be too many Australian Greek Orthodox monks and the church must have comprehensive records. I of course have absolutely no idea what I am talking about. There may be many thousands of Greek Orthodox monks in Australia... at least hundreds... and who is to say he is in Australia?

Of course it may all come to nothing. He may have just found himself drawn to the Greek Orthodox Church by chance, speak no Greek and have no knowledge of his Greek great-grandfather. Then again .....and so it goes through a cavalcade of maybe’s, possibilities, potentialities, probabilities and very, very, very long shots.

I am also thinking of ringing some Ross’s in Murray Bridge, South Australia and have brought up a list of them from the White Pages. I know that at least one of Charlie and Mary’s sons went to live in Murray Bridge because we visited my father’s cousin there, Jack, who was the son of Constantinus John (Jack) and Ada Ellen Davies. But the links seem to have been lost over the years and the family records, when it comes to the Ross name descending from Constantinus and Spiros, go no further than the grandchildren.

The esoteric belief is that ‘energy follows thought’ so I like to think that energy is being sent out into the cosmos regarding Charlie Ross and his Greek origins and that eventually it will bounce something back to me.

There is a wonderful oddness to ancestry research and synchronicity seems part and parcel of the process. One of the oddest and most synchronicitous of circumstances involved Chrysantheous Christus and his English bride, Alice Maude Jones. In an amazing set of coincidences I was brought into contact with Alice Maude’s great-niece, Cathy, who lives in the United Kingdom.

About a year ago, cousin Spike Jones sent me an email along the lines of : Well you are not going to believe it but .....

Cathy, whose grandmother was Alice Maude’s sister, had been researching her family ancestry for about seven years. She started off with the paternal side, the Jones family and then having exhausted what was easily available, started on her mother’s side. A couple of years later she found someone based in Australia who was descended from her mother’s grandfather’s family.

God it gets complex and one ends up surrounded by countless ancestors which makes it very confusing at the best of times. Which is why, clearly, someone else is looking out for us and things just fall into place in the most unexpected ways. And everything happens slowly. Cathy’s stroke of luck came after years of patient research.

Cathy corresponded with the distant relative in Australia for a couple of years and then, in the past year, was told that some new records had gone online regarding British emigrants to Australia. Her Australian relative offered to do some searching for her.

Cathy told her that she knew Alice Maud(e) Jones had married an Australian soldier called Charles Christus Ross (actually Chrysantheous but he used the name of his brother Charles when he got married) and had then emigrated to Adelaide in Australia.

Cathy’s Aussie relative then emailed a cousin from her mother’s side of the family, whom she knew to be actively involved in ancestry research, to ask how to search the birth, marriages and death records in Adelaide and passing on the details which Cathy had provided.

And in that way that the ‘gods’ have, of playing sport with us, the cousin to whom the email was sent, was our Spike (Leonard) Jones. No doubt scratching his head as he typed one-handed, Spike wrote back to say that whilst Alice Jones was not in his line of Jones’s, his father’s sister, Hilda Rose Jones had married Charles Vangelious Ross, the brother of the Australian soldier, Chrysantheous Christus Ross who married Alice Maud(e) Jones.

So, while it was no-go with the Jones’s it seems that both Spike and I are related by marriage to Cathy and he was able to put her in touch with me, and other Ross relations who have been able to help her with research into her great-aunt, Alice Maud(e).

So who says the impossible can’t happen? Who would have thought it? A distant relative of Cathy's great-grandfather, living in Australia, is related to someone who is related to a great-niece, myself, of her great-aunt, Alice Maud(e) Jones. In short, Cathy and I share a great-aunt and great-uncle and are related by marriage. Cathy says she is still amazed and I must admit I am also still struck by the wonderfully synchronicitous nature of it all. Six degrees of separation for sure.

There is no doubt though that the internet makes such research very much easier and speeds up the process. It remains slow, but, given the amount of information Cathy and I have shared with each other and various ‘newly found’ relations over the past year, it is clear that the process of ancestry research via the internet is vastly superior to the processes of the past.

Facts, fantasy, mistaken memory and a Greek Orthodox monk in the family.

PHOTO LEFT: Charles Vangelios Ross in 1938.

One of the most interesting aspects of ancestry research is finding that many memories are ‘not true.’ This is hardly surprising given that in certain times in the past some things were simply not discussed, denied or lied about.

But it is a salutary reminder of how ‘fragile’ is our hold on the past and how so much of what we believe to be our family story may be no more than faulty memory, fantasy, deception or downright lies.

How reliable are our memories? Not very, according to research into crime witnesses. And even when we do remember an event, our memory will be constructed from our interpretation of the event. There will simply be things we do not ‘see’ and so will not remember. To a large degree we ‘see what we expect to see’ and no doubt ‘hear what we expect to hear.’ The latter may well be why Rossolimos ended up as Rostopolous. Or it may not.

‘Not seeing what we do not expect to see’ was demonstrated in an experiment where people were shown a video of a basketball game where, at one point, a man dressed in a gorilla suit, crosses the screen. When questioned afterwards, most of the study group, particularly those who were keen sporting fans and therefore more engrossed in the film, did not see the gorilla.

Other studies demonstrate the same human capacity to ‘forget’, ‘not see’ or ‘remember’ incorrectly. During the 1980 American presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan told a heartbreaking story, over and over again of a World War II bomber pilot who ordered his crew to bail out after his plane had been seriously damaged by an enemy hit. His young belly gunner was wounded so seriously that he was unable to evacuate the bomber. Reagan was nearly in tears as he recounted the pilot's heroic response: ‘Never mind. We'll ride it down together.’

The only problem is that the story was the exact duplicate of a scene in the 1944 movie, A Wing and A Prayer and could not be validated as an actual historical event. The story was ‘true’ but not in a factual sense and yet Reagan’s emotional response was very real. He certainly believed it to be true. Was it a mistaken memory or was it a good story told by a good actor who knew what he was doing?

Whatever the correct answer there was no doubt that for Reagan the story was ‘true’ at an emotional level. For those who believe in the influence of ‘past lives’, and I am very open to the concept because it makes a lot of sense, it could be argued that the ‘story’ resonated with him at an emotional level because it ‘connected’ to a past-life experience.

I can understand how easily a fictional story becomes ‘real’ even without any sort of ‘past-life’ explanation. I remember when I wrote my first novel and found myself later, mixing up the actual memories with the fictional story. Most first novels are semi-autobiographical and like other writers I trawled through my experiences for material with which I could work. I took ‘events’ and people and used them as source material for my characters and my story. What surprised me was how quickly I found myself thinking about my book and having to remind myself that something was ‘fictional’ and not ‘actual.’ My mind was quick to weave the threads together and I can understand how Reagan’s story quickly became ‘fact’ in his mind.

That is why historical records are so crucial to ancestry research because memories are often our least reliable source of information.

I am currently pursuing another ‘memory’ in regard to one of Charlie and Mary’s daughters-in-law, who was supposedly gaoled for procuring abortions. She was clearly a colourful character for her times but is the story true? Riding motorcycles and smoking cigarettes was quite ‘daring’ in the first decades of the 20^th Century and her first child is recorded as being born at a prison. But the birth certificate also records her husband as being employed as a guard at the same prison.

Preliminary checks of prison records do not bring up her name and if closer checking fails to reveal it, can I assume that this ‘story’ is fabricated? Probably. Was it because she was a little too free-thinking and independent for the rest of the family and fantasy quickly became ‘fact’ because it ‘fitted’ what they believed her to be rather than what she was?

As I said at the beginning, the further I go in my quest to ‘find Charlie Ross’ the more I become convinced that whatever story I can weave around him and Mary has as much chance as being true as any other.

But on the factual front I have found another ‘thread’ to follow. While I was going through my research material yesterday I came upon something interesting. Well, I thought it was interesting. And I still do.

In the family ancestry chart a David Ross is listed as a Greek Orthodox Monk. David would have been born in the 1940’s and he is the son of Kevin Ross and the grandson of Spiros Andrew Ross. Like me, he has Charlie Ross as his great-grandfather.

I am not sure if he was born in South Australia or Victoria but I have sent an email to the Greek Orthodox Church in South Australia and also to the national body to try to see if I can trace him. I am thinking that if he became a monk in the Greek Orthodox Church that he probably speaks Greek and must have had an interest in Greece and may well have explored the life of his great-grandfather. I am assuming that his choice to join the Greek Orthodox Church has a connection with his ancestry. That may not be the case of course but it is more likely than not.

How wonderful it would be to be able to employ a cousin who speaks and reads Greek on the quest. Here’s hoping.

Help from unexpected quarters

In the week that brought me dozens of new (old) photos, including Charles Vangelios in his WW1 uniform (see left) and a re-worked cheese biscuit recipe, I have had another offer of possible help from some unexpected quarters.

My brother Ken made contact with the Rossolimo clan and Constantin (Taki) and Effie have been a great help ... most particularly with Effie’s offer, if she has time, to have a look for my family names when next she is in Ithaca and can access the Ithaki archeion.

Like most ‘opportunities’ in ancestry research nothing may come of it ... but then again it might.

Constantin wrote: In our family tree there is a Caralambo Rossolimo born 1770 died 1840. He was a ship owner and a sea merchant.

He was the son of Basilo Rossolimos (1743 - 1802). He had a brother Nicolo (1780 1865). Caralambos had 2 sons Spirodon (1820) and Panaghi (1829). Panagi had three children Caralambo (1863 - 1908), Georgio (died young) and Dr. Andrea Rossolimo (married Maria Saltzi from Constantinople).

According to our records the first Rossolimos to set foot on Ithaki was Nicolo Rossolimos who was appointed as the Governor in 1634.The records in the Ithaki archeion start around 1740. So there is about a 100 year void in data. This branch of the family are recorded in Cephalonia and obviously do not appear on the Ithaki name list.

Effie made the point that Charles could derive from HARALAMBOS, HARILAOS, HRISTOS, HARIS or KAROLOS. This is exciting because previously I had only had a translation of Karolos or Carolus and it seems to me, as I said to Ken, Constantin and Effie, Hristos could well be the origin of Christie which Charlie Ross gave as his father’s name when he married in Gladstone in 1888.

One thing of which I am fairly certain, or as certain as one can ever be when trawling the ancestral past, is that whatever the Greek name might have been, it began with ROS and probably ROSS given that on the marriage certificate Charlie corrects the Greek R (which looks like an English P) to an English R, writes an O, writes a Greek S and then 'remembers' and writes an English S. I would have 'expected' a T not an S at this point if it really was Rostopolous which is our other option.

The other problem is that my Auntie Jessie, who is my father’s sister, is adamant that he came from Ithaca and Rostopolous is a name found only on the mainland. It is possible that she mixed Ithaca up with Kythera since they both sound similar to anglo ears but this leaves the same problem of there being no Rostopolous on Kythera, only Raftopolous which is now excluded.

Conjecture, conjecture, conjecture and so it goes. I still think it makes sense to work with Ithaca before heading to the mainland. Given that Rossolimo and the various spellings of the name were only recorded on Ithaca in 1740, some 110 years before Charlie Ross’s birth, and the Rossolimo family records are still sparse, it is likely that there were other, no doubt poorer members of the family on Ithaca, who ‘slipped through the cracks.’ Or Charlie’s family may have been late-comers to Ithaca. These are all the things I do not know.

Given Greek naming traditions the names of the children are still useful 'guides' in trying to find a family: Constantinus John, (eldest son) Charles Vangelios, (second son) Chrysanthous Christus, (third son) Georgina Anastasia (eldest daughter) and Spiros Andrew (youngest son). Some of these names are certainly found in the Rossolimos family but then they are common Greek names. Charles is distinctive as a Greek name but then so probably are Vangelios and Anastasia and this might be useful in linking with a family.

Some seeds have been sown with the Ithaca Philanthropic Society and the Rossolimos clan and I can only wait to see if they sprout.