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Magoula
Home village
1914
The crossing
4
Generations told
26
People documented
11
Photographs
I.Magoula, Laconia, Greece

A Village Two Kilometers from Sparta

The family story always said Sparta. The ship manifest is more precise: Magoula, a village two kilometers west of Sparta's town center — recorded along with the name of the brother who stayed.

Χαρβούτος — Harvoutis — Harveous — Harris

The name before Harris

Every branch of this family arrived with a name that America rewrote, but none was rewritten as many times as this one. The Greek original — Χαρβούτος — appears on the 1914 ship manifest in the clerk's roman-letter attempt as Horvoutos; the 1978 family chart compiled by Ian's mother spells it Harveous; West Virginia's courthouses settled on Harris. All four names belong to the same man.

George's parents never appear in any American record: Nicholas, who kept the original surname, and Nicholetti Skeades. The 1978 chart's dates for them are garbled (it repeats George's own dates for his father, and gives his mother a birth year that would make her the same age as her son), so only their names and their Sparta origins are trusted here. Finding their real dates in a Greek civil register is this branch's oldest open goal.

1914 manifestParents' dates: chart rows garbled
The Anagnostopoulos line

Jennie's family, in the same town

The woman George would marry grew up amid the same olive country. Jennie Anagnostopoulos was born 15 August 1893, a daughter of Louis Anagnostopoulos (1846–1896) and Anna Chiotes (1843–1901), who had married in September 1876 and both died in Sparta before their daughter ever saw America. Jennie's siblings stayed closer to home than she did: brothers Dimitri and Nicholas lived out their lives in Sparta, sister Vasilica followed the emigrant road as far as New York City, where she married Louie Foffas — and a fourth sibling, Georgia, simply disappears from the record after the 1978 chart, absent from the survivors named in Jennie's 1961 obituary.

FamilySearch-linkedGeorgia: fate unknown after 1978 chart
The Greek registry search came back empty — and that's a real finding

Greekancestry.net's civil-registry database was searched exhaustively for the original surname: direct searches for "Charvoutos," "Harvoutsos," and the Greek script Χαρβούτος all returned zero, and a page-by-page browse of all ~225 indexed entries for Magoula itself — voter lists, an 1856 farmer census, parish registers — found no matching surname under any spelling. The search engine works (a control search returned hundreds of hits), so this is a genuine negative: whatever records survive for this family are not in the indexed collections. The next step, a written request to the Lakonia state archive, is on Ian's own to-do list.

II.Patras → New York, 2 April 1914

A Ship Called Laconia

15 July 1913 · Rows 19–21 of the manifest

Married first, then the ocean

George and Jennie married on 15 July 1913. Nine months later they boarded a ship at Patras whose name reads like a blessing on the voyage: the S.S. Laconia — named for the very Greek province they were leaving. The manifest, rows 19 through 21, records George — a confectioner by trade — traveling beside Harvourous, Jannula, married, a housewife, from Magoula, bound for Weston: the row directly below his. Jannula is the Greek diminutive of Ioanna — Jennie — and the row has now been read from the manifest image itself rather than an index. It is as firm as one document can make it; a second record naming her arrival would close it. The ship reached New York on 2 April 1914.

The manifest holds two more details worth keeping. George's nearest relative in Greece is given as his brother, Nick Charvoutos of Magoula — the brother who stayed, and the reason this record can name the family's exact village rather than just "Sparta." And his declared destination was already fixed: Weston, West Virginia.

S.S. Laconia manifest, Ellis Island"Jannula" row: read from the image, one document only
Married first, then the ocean
George and Jennie, about the time of their 1913 marriage. The portrait appears cropped from a larger group photograph — a faint red circle marking another figure survives at the edge.
III.1914–1961

The Merchant of Weston

24 Dec 1885 – 13 May 1937

George Nicholas Harris

The family has always said he was born on Christmas Day, and the stone over him agrees. George himself said otherwise, twice: his sworn Declaration of Intention of 1920 gives 24 December 1885, and the federal naturalization index for West Virginia repeats it — born at Sparta, departed from Patras, arrived at New York. This page takes the man's own sworn word over the family's and the stonecutter's, by one day, and keeps the 25th on file.

He spent his American years as a merchant in Weston — the word his own death certificate uses; his petition says confectioner. He formalized his new country in two steps that survive on paper: the Declaration of Intention filed at the Lewis County courthouse in October 1920, and Petition for Naturalization No. 774, filed at Clarksburg in December 1922. That petition is quietly one of the most valuable documents on this branch: it lists his children with exact birthdates no other record preserves.

Then, on 3 March 1935, something nobody in the family had recorded: the register of U.S. Appointments of Postmasters carries George N. Harris, Weston, Lewis County. A man who landed from Patras in 1914 with a confectioner's trade held a federal appointment twenty-one years later. The register gives the name, the office and the date; what grade of appointment it was, and for how long, is still to be read from the original.

He died two years after that, on 13 May 1937, at Clarksburg — the state death index and his memorial agree on the place; Weston, which the family gave, is where he was buried. He was fifty-one. His grave at Machpelah Cemetery is marked by a tall cross-shaped stone that makes the essential point in three words carved for anyone passing to read: BORN IN SPARTA, GREECE.

Death certificate; WV deaths index1920 declaration, 1922 petition, federal naturalization indexPostmaster, Weston, 3 Mar 1935 — found September 2026Postmaster appointment: grade and term not yet read from the original
George Nicholas Harris
George's cross-shaped marker at Machpelah Cemetery, Weston — "BORN IN SPARTA, GREECE."
1915–1921

Six children, two lost at once

George and Jennie's children arrived through the 1910s: Lena in 1915; Ana in 1916; twin boys, Leonidas and Nicholas, born in 1916 and lost the same year in infancy; Helen in 1918; and finally Gus, the only surviving son, in 1921. Ana's birth year is a small monument to why this archive flags conflicts instead of erasing them — her father's petition says 1916, FamilySearch says 1918, and her own memorial says 1917, and no document yet settles it.

1922 petition children listAna's birth year: three sources, three answers
1937–1961 · 27 Kitson Street

Jennie's long widowhood

Jennie outlived George by twenty-four years, raising the family from the house on Kitson Street and holding to the Greek Orthodox faith she had carried from Laconia — her parish was at Clarksburg, thirty miles off, the nearest there was. And she held to something else. In 1940, under the Alien Registration Act, every non-citizen in the country had to register; Jennie Harris, born 1893, Greece, is on that roll. George had become a citizen in 1920. Jennie, twenty-six years in America by then, never did. The record does not say why, and this page will not guess; it only notes that husband and wife took different roads on the one question every immigrant is asked.

She died on 11 October 1961, a Wednesday evening, in a hospital at Weston, after a year's illness; the funeral was on Saturday the 14th from Floyd's, Reverend Karas officiating, and she was buried at Machpelah, where George lay. Her estate went to probate a week later. The Weston paper's obituary preserved what no one else had written down: it named her brothers still in Sparta, her sister in New York, her daughters' married homes — the single document that stitched the American family back to the Greek one.

The year took some settling. The family chart said October 1960. The obituary named a Saturday funeral on the 14th, which falls in 1961, not 1960 — and the state death register now says 1961 outright. The chart was wrong by a year; the newspaper was right.

WV deaths index, 11 Oct 1961; 1961 obituary; WV wills & probateAlien registration, 1940 — she never naturalised; found September 2026
Jennie's long widowhood
Jennie in her kitchen — labeled "Grandmother" in her granddaughter Lee's handwriting.
IV.1921–1970

The Confectioner's Son

2 Apr 1921 – 31 Aug 1970 · U.S. Coast Guard, WWII

Gus George Harris

Gus was the youngest, Weston-born, and the first of the line to wear an American uniform. He enlisted in the Coast Guard in April 1942 — the local paper ran his portrait in its honor roll that same year — and served until February 1946, the full arc of the war. Family memory had always said Navy; the VA's own record and his headstone both say Coast Guard. The two get conflated in family stories often enough that this reads less like an error than like memory rounding toward the more famous service.

In March 1947 he married Roberta Allen — not in West Virginia, but across the state line in Frederick County, Virginia, which in that era was known for exactly one thing among young couples: no waiting period. The records won't say the word, so this page won't either — but everything about a quick Virginia courthouse wedding is consistent with an elopement. (A third record places the wedding in Suffolk, Virginia, two hundred miles away — a conflict still flagged, not resolved. Roberta's own story is told on the Allen family page.)

VA BIRLS Death FileHeadstone + 1942 clippingMarriage place: three records, three towns
Gus George Harris
Gus in Coast Guard uniform outside a Weston house, 1940s.
1950 census · 16 Center St, Weston

The candy store on Center Street

The 1950 census found Gus at twenty-nine, married to Roberta, two small sons at home — working as a bartender and waiter at a candy store. Read alone, it's a job. Read against the 1914 manifest, it rhymes: the man who arrived in America listing his trade as confectioner had a son behind a candy-store counter in the same town thirty-six years later. Nothing yet proves whose store it was — but the census taker, without meaning to, recorded a family trade surviving a generation and an ocean.

Gus died in 1970, not yet fifty, and was buried at Machpelah — the same ground as his father.

1950 U.S. CensusShop link: suggestive, unproven
The candy store on Center Street
"My father" — Gus as a young man, labeled in Lee Hall's hand in the family scrapbook.
V.The Family Today

Four Generations On

Living relatives appear here by name and relationship only — no dates, no places — by the standing rule of this archive.

  • 1913George Harvoutis marries Jennie Anagnostopoulos.
  • 1914The S.S. Laconia sails from Patras; George lands in New York, bound for Weston, WV.
  • 1922George's naturalization petition — the family becomes American on paper.
  • 1935George is appointed postmaster at Weston.
  • 1937George dies at 51; the cross at Machpelah goes up.
  • 1947Gus marries Roberta Allen in a no-wait Virginia courthouse town.
  • 1950The census finds Gus working at a Weston candy store — his father's trade, one generation on.
  • 1961Jennie dies at Weston; her obituary reconnects the Weston family to the Sparta one.
  • 1978Lee Anna Harris Hall hand-draws the Harris family charts — the family's own record, a generation early.

The living line

Gus and Roberta's four children are Ian's mother and his aunts and uncles: Lee Anna Harris Hall — who compiled the 1978 hand-drawn chart and Family Group sheets this entire branch was rebuilt from — Roger Harris, who married Judith Kay (her maiden surname, half-legible on the 1978 sheet as "Karakoft" or "Karakott," is still an open question), Cindy G. Harris, who married Jeff Sims and whose family is told on the Sims page, and George Harris Jr., who married Deborah Ann MacArthur. The next generation includes Christopher Harris (Roger and Judith's son) and Steven Ray Harris (George and Deborah's son).

Ian's testimony + 1978 family papersJudith Kay's surname
Still open on this branch: George's parents' real dates (a Greek-archive request is drafted for Ian to send); Georgia Anagnostopoulos's fate; Ana's birth year; Judith Kay's surname; the Gus–Roberta marriage place; and a Vietnam-era military record for a family member whose common name has so far defeated every index search.