Lineage

Sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, a boy of sixteen leaves Syria. He passes through southern France, then Rio de Janeiro, then walks into the Minas Gerais village of Acaiaca where his uncle is. The family does not remember his original name with certainty.

Vô Tony and Vó Fia, Fernanda''s great-grandparents, told as faithfully as the typed family page records them. The chapter quotes the page where it can and adds nothing the source does not contain.

Carmelita — João Elias''s wife, mother of Tony — was not herself an immigrant. Her surname before marriage was Mol; her line traces back through six generations to colonial-era Minas Gerais.

The settlement where João Elias arrived from Syria, married Carmelita, opened his venda, and raised nine children. Where Vó Fia''s family moved in 1930. Where Tony and Fia married in 1943. The original anchor of the Elias side of this family.

Fernanda Elias Thompson's father, José Siqueira da Cruz, descends from a Brazilian family whose paternal grandmother — Alice da Costa e Silva (b. 1908) — traces back five and six generations to a single 18th-century patriarch named Joaquim Felipe Nery de Miranda. Through two of his children, Francisco Félix de Miranda and José Felipe Nery de Miranda, two separate Miranda lines descend and converge in Alice, making her parents second cousins in the deep tree.

Through marriage, the da Costa e Silva surname enters the family — Delfran, Maria da Conceição, Antonio Luis, Lourival, with Olympia Flora as matriarch. To be expanded with stories from Fernanda's own memory.

December 23, 2002, Colorado. The chapter will be written when the recipient is old enough to read it.