Virginia Meniates (1899–1976)

The Matriarch of Oak Street

Let me tell you about Virginia Meniates. She was born in Greece in 1899, at the very end of the 1800s, just as her country was about to go through enormous changes. Girls in those days had few chances to go to school, especially in the countryside and on the islands, and it seems Virginia never had any formal education. That was common for women of her generation. She learned at home instead. Family duties, the traditions of the church, and the everyday skills of running a household were what got a young woman ready for adult life.In 1920, when she was twenty-one, Virginia came to the United States. She arrived through New York on April 1. By 1923 she was living in western Massachusetts, and that year she married Peter Barbalias in Springfield and began her grown-up life in a new country.Springfield in the 1920s was a growing factory city, and it already had a well-established Greek community. The churches, the mutual-aid societies (clubs where members chipped in to help each other through sickness or hard times), and big extended families gave newcomers like Virginia a piece of home and real, practical help. That’s the world where Virginia built her life as a wife and mother. She contributed by running the household and taking part in the community, not through schooling or a paycheck. She very likely spent a good deal of time helping out at her husband’s business, the Athens Candy Store.Virginia and her husband, Peter George Barbalias, raised two children in Springfield. Their daughter, Alice, was born on October 3, 1928, and their son, James Peter, on June 30, 1934. Those were the years of the Great Depression, when families needed toughness, thrift, and the ability to adapt, and immigrant families needed them most of all. The candy store surely gave them some financial security during those hard times, and the family was described as being of "comfortable means."Virginia lived in Springfield for the rest of her life. Records from 1956, 1958, and 1959 show her there, decades after she first made the city her home. Her later years brought loss: her husband, Peter, died on September 29, 1969, at eighty. Widowed in her late sixties, Virginia stayed close to her family and to the community she knew.She died on December 16, 1976, at seventy-seven. Her obituary ran the next day in The Republican under the last name Barbalian. That’s a common variation of the Greek name, and Peter’s page explains how it came about.