Continuing from yesterday:
When the internet came along, suddenly you could look up people anywhere in the country, even the world. Yellow and white pages went online. Personal websites and blogs started to flourish in the early part of this decade. Suddenly, the world got a hell of a lot smaller overnight. As millions of others did, I set out on an expedition in this relatively new frontier and started plugging “Copetas” into as many websites as I could and was surprised to find that there were indeed many of us out there. Far more than I ever imagined! Most of them were in Pittsburgh, some were in Ohio, Washington state, Illinois, D.C. and a few other places. We Copetas’s in Massachusetts were suddenly a small part of a much larger group and I needed to find out more.
Fast forward to 2006 – email contact had been made with a few people and I had regular correspondence with a couple of them. A few didn’t seem terribly interested in trying to understand how we were all related, but a few did and enjoyed hearing from the little island of Copetas’s in Massachusetts. I came to find out that each year at the big Greek Orthodox church in Pittsburgh, they actually held a dinner for the descendants who came from the little Vlahokaishota village in Greece (mentioned in yesterday’s blog post) – and plenty of Copetas’s attend it. The dinner every year draws about 250-300 people, all of whom are tied to one small village in Greece. Of course, I thought this was something I needed to attend. Where else would we find a place where we could attempt to get a better understanding of who we are and try to “re-connect” with family? No better place than a dinner where a lot of us would be in one room! I wasn’t able to make it in 2007 or 2008. But 2009 was a different story. More on that later this week.