Part 2: James and Pete Arrive in DC (1906)

The place where it happened still stands:  821 8th SE

My father always told me that Pete’s older brother Adam came first after opening a candy store on the corner of Ninth and K Street NW. I found both brothers listed in the 1910 census, but Adam reported that he got to the U.S. in 1908 on the 1920 census and his age was about a year younger than Pete.

But I also remembered my father saying that Pete eventually sold his H Street candy shop to his cousin James Cokinos. I scoured old newspapers for all things "Cokinos," and James’s very informative obituary popped up. James reportedly arrived in America in 1902 when he was twenty two years old, and first landed in Wilmington, Delaware to make his start in the candy business, not Washington DC. I could not find a ship's log for him, but I did find one for Panos "Koinos."

Like most Greek immigrants back then, all of our family came through Ellis Island. The Ellis Island Foundation offers ship manifests with basic information.  “Panos Koinos” came on the steamship Georgia on October 7, 1905.  This information was promising, but I had to look at the original document to view possible transcription errors.

I took this clue back to the Ancestry site where I could look up a ship’s manifest by its date and go through the records page by page. It was worth it. I found my Panos, and a trove of little details about his journey. First off- the bad handwriting did look more like Panos Kokinos than the “Koinos” as someone else had transcribed. Also this Panos reported his last residence as Agulnitsa which gave me reassurance that this was indeed my grandfather.

I learned from the ship’s log that Panos came with a friend named Giovanni, and that their destination was not Washington, DC but Wilmington, Delaware- exactly where James Cokinos had started life in America.

Coincidence? I think not.

Other details were more confusing than enlightening. Panos was going to live with his “son in law” Andrea with an illegible last name (Chenfrotis?) on Market Street in Wilmington. Panos, who listed his age as 27, seemed a tad young to have a son-in-law.  Giovanni, also from Agulnitsa, was going to live with Andrea, too. He listed Andrea as a friend in the manifest.  Both men were listed as pastry cooks.  

I pored over Wilmington’s street directories, and couldn’t find any listings for Cokinos, but I did see a lot of Greek confectioners listed in Wilmington in the early 1900s. Greek owned candy shops were definitely a thing.

I am not sure why James moved to DC, but I found a tiny announcement in the Washington Post on July 28, 1906 stating that Louis Pappas Paleologos was selling his candy business at 721 8th Street to James Cokinos. Wow. This is the oldest record showing our family’s arrival in Washington and the new spelling of Kokinos with a "C."

Pete does not appear in the street directory until 1908, but I have to imagine they pulled up stakes and moved from Wilmington together since were both working in and living above the same shop on 8th Street. And surprise - Pete's brother Adam was living there, too. It may have been a tight squeeze for three men in a small apartment, but these guys were just getting started.

Part 1: Minutia Tells The Story

 

Researching the Greek side of the family has always daunted me.  Thanks to my father George and his siblings, our family is rich in oral, though sometimes, mythical history, and short on documented facts. Tracing a Hellenic background is rough going. First there’s a different alphabet leading to every spelling variation under the Sun because who is to say what is the right translation for a Greek letter that doesn’t exist in English?  Once the name was translated, inevitable variations of spelling, nicknames, or the option of full blown Anglo choices popped into play. I had to dig deep into the few factual details I already had and look directly at things like street directories and ship’s logs. After I realized this, I was finally able to cobble together my grandparents’ story. 

Pota, Pete, and friend Hain's Point 1919

Kicking off this ball of confusion, my grandmother and grandfather had the same first name. He was christened Panayoti, and she was Panayiota. Both literally translate into “all holy, ’the Greek name for  Mary as in mother of Jesus. My Yiya could have been a rock star ahead of her time if she had gone with Madonna, but she defaulted to Mary in the 1920 census and was listed as “Porter” in 1930 which may have been a census taker error. I’ve also found old documents where she tried on Pauline and the unfathomable Bertha before finally sticking with Pota.  

My grandfather came to this country as Panos Kokinos and to the end of his life celebrated August 15th as his and his wife’s name day even though he chose Peter as his American name which is a translation for Petros not Panayota. 

My grandparents, like many immigrants, had a deep distrust of the government.

Their birth year often depended on who was mining the information. Pete gave different answers to the tax collector, the insurance agent, and the census taker.  Using the ten year variation option in Ancestry’s search engine was a must for me.  

Why the family adopted Cokinos instead of Kokkinos is lost to time. The letter "c" is not found in the Greek alphabet, but immigrants wanted to fit in, not stand out in their new country. Perhaps Cokinos with a C looked more American, but this is just a guess.

I started my research with my father’s stories. There were seven boys and three girls in the Cokinos family.  They were all born in a large house in a tiny village, spelled Agulnitsa or Agoulanitsa- near Olympia in the Peloponnese. Their names were: Dionysios, Agamemnon, Vassilios, Adam, Andreas, Panos and Alekos. 

The girls were  Chryssa, Tessia and Evinia. According to my father, four of the brothers stayed and farmed the olive groves while three, Peter, Aleck, and Adam went to college in Athens.  I am not sure about Alec, but my father thought Pete went to confectionary school. In any case, all of the young men had to complete two years of mandatory military service by their twentieth birthdays. Here is a photo of Pete and Alec taken around 1900 in Greece. It's the second oldest photo we have of Pete.

Possibly Andreas, Pete and Aleck 

I decided to stick with the age listed on Pete's military papers. I figured the earlier documents had to be more accurate than later ones. He was a sergeant in the Greek army in 1898, and a passport from 1927 both confirmed his birthdate as 1877. Here is the oldest photo of Pete - probably taken around 1896.

Panos Kokinos c1896

My father thought that each of the Cokinos children inherited a room in their family home in Agulnitsa which is now known as Epitalion. The name was changed to reflect Greek heritage, not former conquests.

It was a large house, but the village was small. At least four of the Cokinos brothers came to America, one sending for the next, as prospects grew better - just like the Russian brothers in the movie “Avalon.”  Like that family and most immigrant communities, they were a close knit group holding tightly to traditions and relying heavily on each other. Many planned to make their fortunes and return home again.  

I always imagined my grandfather and his brothers packing a rucksack and riding out of Agoulanitsa on a donkey or perhaps trudging on foot over the hills to the port of Patras. Singing might have been involved in my imagination. In my mind, they looked like this guy.

But this image of my grandfather is more likely.

I later came to realize the village had its own train station in 1905.  It's the size of a bus stop, but still a station nevertheless. This is what it looked like when I visited in 2004.

No donkeys. My grandfather most likely took a train to the ship that would bring him to America.

Intro: Cokinos Was Greek to Me

Hopa !

When I began researching the family history, I took up the torch that my maternal grandmother left behind. She was the historian of the family who wanted to explore her roots. I became interested in our past slowly over the years, but the internet transformed research from writing away for documents to a click of a mouse.

My own memories of my grandparents were limited. On my father’s side of the family, I was nine years old when Peter Cokinos, my papou, died in 1968.  My memories have him mostly confined to a chair, or walking with a good deal of help. I never saw him dance like he did in the torn photo I found in an old album. I didn’t know him very well at all, but I remember thinking he was a tiny bit scary.  At the time no one ever explained that he had had a stroke in the early 1960s while traveling in Greece. Just recently, my older sister told me that he had a heavy Greek accent and gruff manner, and that she was a bit afraid of him as well. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and it never occurred to me that English was not his first language. I knew Papou had a sense of humor because he loved to trip unsuspecting grandkids with his cane and laugh at the result.

Aug 15, 1962

I asked my sister what she remembered. but when put on the spot, she could only come up with two things.

1. He smoked.

2. My grandmother would rub his head with coal oil while he had a cigarette, and she would fuss at him for smoking.

The coal oil was not a punishment but a cure-all when olive oil was short on supply.

I do know from my father’s stories that Pete loved to drive. He and my father shared a love for cars from the first Model T to the last Cadillac. 

Pete's last home was a duplex on Upton Street which came with not one or two, but eight little garages which lined the back of the property. My grandmother rented most of the spaces for "egg money." Pete's garage was hung with old tires used to protect both the car and the building when he backed out into the alley.

When Pete was in his late eighties, the Department of Motor Vehicles imposed a written driving test. I get the impression it was taken in a big room, and that my father sat waiting for him on the sidelines. I am not sure how they planned this caper, but between frequent trips to the bathroom and distracting the supervisor, the test was successfully completed by my father, and my grandfather “passed.” 

The next step was a parallel parking test outside with cones. Pete hit every one of them. Fortunately,  the man who gave the test was a former customer from Churchill’s, the family restaurant, and Dad promised the man that Pete would only be driving to church on Sundays and to visit his daughter in Chevy Chase. Aunt Catherine was probably not thrilled with the decision as Pete had a habit of running up and over the curb when he arrived causing her to yell at him from her kitchen window.  

Pete Cokinos died in 1968. He was about ninety years old, but no one really knew because he fibbed about his age all his life. I have found official documents with his birth date listed between 1875 and 1887. In the census of 1910, he claimed he was 33 years old, and ten years later in 1920, he claimed to be 36. I decided to go by an early document- an 1898 military paper from when Pete was in the Greek army. It stated he was19 years old, and that made his birth date 1877 so we will stick with that.

We never did know how old his wife Pota was either. Greeks celebrate their saint’s name days more than birthdays. My yiya also adjusted her age like a yo-yo. She was much younger than her husband, but the age gap got wider in her mind as they grew older.

Pota and Pete on Upton Street

I remember Pota as a warm person but also slightly scary. My mother dutifully called to check in on her and sometimes would put me on the phone as well. If we didn’t call often enough, Yiya would pretend that she didn’t know who I was and would hoot at me  “Who you? Who you?” Baffled, I would try and turn the phone back over to my mother, but she would shake her head, leaving me to awkwardly explain our relationship.  

I was the tenth grandchild, and Yiya inevitably celebrated my May birthday with candy- usually a Whitman Sampler which had been carefully preserved in her overstuffed freezer since Christmas. 

(I couldn’t help but notice the poinsettia printed cellophane wrap.)

Pota outlived her husband by at least twenty years, so I remember her better than my grandfather. She never left the duplex on Upton Street across from a grocery store which is now a post office. In warm weather she liked to sit on the front porch where she could watch her roses climbing the chain link fence around the yard, and keep an eye on the activity at Safeway. I always thought it was the greatest thing that she kept a grocery cart in the front yard. If the weather was cold, she would be ensconced in her big green leather chair in the TV room at the back of the house watching her soaps. 

Pota was not much for conversation in English, but she was great at sighing. She sighed often and loudly. “Oh me! Oh, poor me.” My mother faithfully took me to visit at least once a month which became a routine of sorts. When we first arrived, we would be offered sustenance. It was decided early on that Kouleria cookies were my favorite thing. I was a picky eater and didn’t like fruit or nuts so a twisted buttery shortbread cookie right out of the freezer was fine with me. And a glass of milk. 

Then we would settle in to watch the soaps. “Oh, me !” my grandmother would sigh as she sank into her big chair in front of the TV.  My mother would sit primly on a straight back chair, a bit at a loss for words. I think she timed our visits to coincide with “General Hospital” which was one of the few things my non- Greek mother and Yiya had in common. To me daytime dramas were boring grown-up stuff. I kept my eye on the cuckoo clock ticking away above the TV, not wanting to miss the bird coming out of its little door to shout the hour. Cuckoo! Cuckoo ! Cuckoo!  Poor me!  That’s how the afternoon went.

In the late 1960s, Kalliope Kokinos, an older maiden niece from Papou's home village of Agoulnitsa, was sent as a companion and helper for Yiya and Papou. Kalliope was not a very happy person, and she always seemed a touch angry. She wore dark tinted glasses which might look cool on a poker player, but were a bit odd on an elderly woman.  

My cousin Pete called her “sweet cheeks.” In retrospect, I feel sorry for her. She was probably unwanted by family in Greece, and the solution was to boot her to America where, late in life, she was expected to be useful. She spoke almost no English, and wasn’t interested in learning.  Even though she was about thirty years younger than my grandmother, Yiya outlived her. Caliiope died in 1982. Yiya hung on another two years until just after Christmas in 1984 when she died at her home on Upton Street with all of her garages in the back.