Tony and Fia
Vô Tony — Antônio Elias — was a son of Carmelita and João Elias. His siblings, in the order recorded by the family's own typed page: Marta, Iaiana (Mariana), Zezé Elias (José Elias), Jarbas, Lulu (Luís), Maria, Gegê (Geraldo), and Lila (Marília). Nine children in all, of whom Tony was one.1
Dona Carmelita, Tony's mother, was muito habilidosa com suas mãos. The typed page records the specific work: she transformed cans into cups, made beautiful crowns delivered each year at the Festa do Rosário, and restored broken religious images.2
Vó Fia was the daughter of Augusto José de Oliveira and Bárbara Lopes. She had three siblings: José Carlos, Júlio Cruz, and Benedito. She was born on March 27, 1924, and moved with the family to Acaiaca in 1930, at age six.3
Vó Fia's mother ran a venda — a small shop — in Acaiaca that sold even bacalhau norueguês, Norwegian salted cod. The eldest son of the family took care of the business.4
In 1943, Vó Fia and Vô Tony married. They worked together in coffee, rice, and corn.5
After Vó Fia's parents died, she took charge of raising her younger brothers Júlio and Benedito.6
Vó Fia was born blind in one eye. The family record makes a striking detail explicit: she did not discover the deficiency until after she was already married. She went blind in the other eye at age forty.7
Vô Tony went to work at Tratex — a Brazilian textile manufacturer — which is the reason the family moved through inúmeras cidades de Minas Gerais. The textile jobs followed the mills.8
Vó Fia and Vô Tony had eleven children. The names and birth order are not preserved in the typed page. The first child died shortly after birth.9
The eldest surviving son, José, was the first to move to Belo Horizonte and encouraged the family to follow. In 1968, the whole family moved to BH. Vô Tony continued to work away from home; Vó Fia lovingly raised the eleven children. After years of working away, Tony returned to Belo Horizonte and bought a house for the family — the home the family still calls nossa raiz (our root) to this day.10
Vó Fia foi uma mulher guerreira e bondosa. Vô Tony um homem muito honesto e trabalhador. That is how the typed page describes them. The chapter does not paraphrase.11
Their Christmas. Vó Fia prepared the lunch on December 25 with the famous doces de leite, figo e cidra — milk sweets, candied figs, candied citron. Vô Tony took his entire thirteenth-month salary every year to buy presents for the children and grandchildren.12
Artifacts
Photos, scans, and documents that back this chapter. Each carries a SHA256 fingerprint so the file can be independently verified as unchanged since upload, and a short code — the tiny adjective-noun pair below each card — for compact reference (e.g. lineage.sent.li/a/sage-pine).