Mary Strattos (1899–1979)
A Young Mother Responsible for a Large Family
Let me tell you about Mary. She was born in 1899 on the beautiful Greek island of Lesvos, in its capital, Mytilene. Mytilene is an ancient town by the sea, and for centuries its people lived by fishing, growing olives, and trading by ship. In the years just after 1900, life on Lesvos was hard. Mytilene was a busy regional port, but there still weren't many ways to get ahead on the island. So more and more young people left for the United States to find opportunity. They were part of Greece's great wave of emigration.The evidence suggests that Mary married Peter Nicholas Madamas in Greece when she was only fourteen or fifteen. Imagine being married at your age! She never had a formal education. Peter had already started making a life for himself in Massachusetts, as one of the early Greeks to settle in New England. Once he had laid that groundwork, he went back to Mytilene to claim his bride. That was a common thing for Greek men to do: get settled first, then marry. Around 1914 the two of them crossed the Atlantic together, and Mary's new life began.Mary was pregnant with her first child on that voyage. Soon after they arrived, she gave birth to a son, John, in Springfield. Sadly, he died within days of being born. That was the start of more than thirty years of family life in western New England. Mary learned a new language and a new culture, and she kept up the traditions she had brought with her from Lesvos.We think Mary's father may have been Evstratios Papevstratiou. After she came to America, Mary seems to have shortened her maiden name (the last name she was born with) and made it sound more American: Strattos. It's a Greek-based surname that comes from the root word stratós, which means "army." Lots of Greek immigrants simplified their names like this, especially women.Over the years Mary became the mother of eight children:John (1914)Charles Peter (1915)Bessie (1917)Helen (1921)Nicholas (1923)Irene (1926)Anna (1928)Aphrodite, known as Affy (1931)At first the family spent some time in Connecticut before putting down roots in Massachusetts. The census, a count of everyone in the country taken every ten years, places them in Enfield by 1920. By 1930 they were firmly in Springfield, living on Bradford Street and later on Dwight Street. The census always listed Mary as a homemaker. She could read and write, and she spoke two languages. Running a household that big was mostly her job, through the years between the two World Wars and through the Great Depression, when money was scarce for almost everyone.Mary's life changed completely in 1949, when her husband died. She was widowed in the middle of her life, but she stayed in Springfield and kept the family home going. Several of her children, some grown and some in their late teens, still lived with her. To help support the family, Mary went to work as a seamstress, sewing clothes.Mary lived the rest of her life in Springfield, and she died there on November 5, 1979, at eighty. Her life took her from the harbor of Mytilene to the neighborhoods of Springfield. Along the way came island beginnings, an early marriage, an ocean crossing, and a lifetime of devotion to her family. Many Greek immigrant women lived lives like hers. Quietly, they built the foundations of their communities in America.