First Blog

Hi! This is my first blog and I have no clue what I'm doing but I thought it might make a nice edition to my website. I will TRY to post the changes I've made to my website here so that you won't have to go through every page to figure out what has changed. I expect my web page will change frequently.

I just started my website back in March and I have a LONG way to go before I'm done. Actually I don't think I'll ever be done. I am currently working on scanning pictures in so that when I go to Dayton, OH in September I'll be able to show family members the pictures and hopefully get a lot of pictures identified. If anybody would like to meet with me while I'm there I'll be in Dayton from September 17-20th and so far I have no plans other than hopefully meeting with Tasi and his mom Julia. Julia is 94 years old and hopefully will be able to help with pictures that others won't be able. Hopefully Julia will be with us for many more years but since we just lost Julia's 99 year old sister in law I'm feeling like I really need to get moving on this project. My grandmother Carmen who is 91 is also still with us but she lives in Florida and I don't get there very often and she is from the next generation and wasn't in the family until sometime in the 1930's.

I am amazed at how much traffic my website is getting already. I wanted to have most if not all my pictures scanned in and posted to my page before I was going to go out soliciting help from the list of email addresses I have managed to collect from the internet. Unfortunately I wasn't very motivated until I started getting emails from cousins around the world, now I can't get enough, I wish I could quit my day job and do nothing but this. Apparently I'm not the only one in the family who types in 'Zavakos' in a search engine to see what comes back. I always thought I was a little weird but I guess it's just one of the joys of having an unusual last name. I would try to find information on my husband's family but with a last name like wood I'd hate to think how many results I'd get back. I just typed in 'wood family geneaology' and got back about 1,350,000 results, 'Zavakos' nets us just 2,870 results. When I first started searching on Zavakos I think I got back 3 pages of results, we've come a long way.

I just emailed Nikos Zavakos at Nutria (an olive oil company in Athens Greece, http://www.nutria.gr/en/index.asp) to see if we are related, I'll let you know if I get anything back from him. Hopefully he will know English because other than what Elaine A. has taught me (papou and yiayia) I don't know a lick of Greek.

Laura Zavakos Wood