Lambros James Matthews

"Lambros" (Λάμπρος) isn't the kind of name you typically see before a family name like "Matthews." Lambros is a Greek name meaning "radiant," and is associated with the word for Easter (Lambri, Λαμπρή).

Nevertheless, Lambros was James Matthews' first name, just as it was his grandfather's. Yet "Matthews" wasn't his grandfather's last name. It was Hatjimathios.

And contrary to what James' father put on the 1930 census, the Hatjimathios family wasn't from Greece. They actually came from Cesme, a town on the Aegean coast of Turkey.

Which explains why he came over in 1921.

Between 1914 and 1922, a large part of the Greek population in Turkey was forced to leave their ancestral homelands of Ionia, Pontus and Eastern Thrace. Those families didn't see themselves as Turkish -- they were Greek, even if they weren't from Greece per se.

That was part of the problem. The new Turkish state saw them as a threat -- much like the Armenians -- and during the 1919-1922 Greco-Turkish War, the Greeks in Turkey suffered numerous atrocities.

I don't know what James' father saw, but he escaped a country at war only a few years ahead of a massive population exchange involving 1.5 million people.

The desire to fit in to his new country -- to not have a target on his back because of his identity -- must have appealed to him greatly. He changed Hatjimathios to Matthews, settled in New Jersey, married an American woman from North Carolina named Inez Juanita Langley, and began a new life.

Lambros James Matthews was my grandfather's cousin. And it was 100 years ago that *his* father, Mathios Hatjimathios, came to America.