I’m writing an Afterword, and you won’t believe why…

I'm working on an Afterword for Called to Greece — and it's turning out to be one of the most surprising parts of the book.

During the pandemic, while everything was shut down, I needed something to do to keep my mind off the crazy world outside. So I did what researchers do. I took a DNA test and buried myself in family trees.

What I found amazed me. A DNA match led me to a cousin in Florida I never knew existed – through her, to my Yiayia Theone’s brother that nobody in our family had ever heard of.

The next morning, my son Kosta came running down the stairs and asked, “Do we have long lost cousins in Florida?” Shocked at how he could know this when I had only just confirmed it, I replied, “uuumm yes?”

“Really? I just got a message on Instagram from someone named Rhianna saying we were long lost cousins and I thought it was a hoax!”

Next I discovered a first cousin of my father's in Australia, his family separated from ours during the Catastrophe of Smyrna in 1922. Michael had never met a single blood relative until he met me in the summer of 2023 on the island of Lesvos.

And then — closest to home — a relative I never knew about. Living right here in Stony Creek. He used to be our landlord. His grandmother was from Plomari.

Plomari, it turns out, had been here all along.

The ancestry journey never really ends.