Dorchester Illustration no. 2423 Christos John Alexander
At the Dorchester Historical Society, we are in the process of a year-long project to commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War I. Using a collection of photographs we have of WWI Dorchester residents, we will be featuring servicemen in a number of short biographies throughout the year. At the culmination of the project, we hope to produce an online exhibit that highlights these men and their service to our country.
Our next biography features: Christos John Alexander Written by Julie Wolf
Christos John Alexander was born to Ionnis Alexandropou and Ekaterini Oikonomopolou in Stemnitsa, Greece. Spellings of the Greek names vary across documents, as does Christos’s birthdate, which appears as May 22, August 30, and September 26, 1889; January 12, 1890; and “about 1890.” Despite inconsistencies, errors, and his absence from census records, corroborating details gleaned from city directories, immigration, travel, and military files, and family members’ data allowed us to plot Christos’s course through life.
Between 1890 and 1924, 400,000-plus Greek immigrants came to the United States, primarily young men intending to earn money and return home. A 1911 naturalization document had Christos “Alexandra” of 127 “South” Avenue, Dorchester, arriving aboard the Francesca “around September 18, 1906.” However, a November 17, 1907, Francesca manifest includes a Christos Alexandropoulos, final destination 18 Lansing Street, Boston—Christos’s parents’ or sister Angeliki’s address on her 1907 marriage record. Elsewhere his arrival date appears as 1905.
Christos’s World War I draft card, filed in 1917, lists his address as 127 Southern Avenue, which he possibly shared with his mother, listed as a dependent. Of medium height and build, with brown eyes and “dark” hair, he was a fruit dealer at 30 Commercial Street, Boston, and claimed “rheumatism in knee and back” as an exemption from service. The exemption wasn’t granted, and on December 7, 1917, he enlisted at the Boston (now Charleston) Navy Yard. Over 267 days, he had four different postings as a mess attendant, 1st class: Receiving Ship in Boston (December 31, 1917-March 4, 1918); Headquarters Boston, Section Boston (March 4-7); Receiving Ship Boston (March 27-April 18); and finally, the Chelsea Naval Hospital (April 18-August 31, 1918, the date of his discharge). The card notes an unspecified “physical disability.”
Another naturalization document, dated 1924, shows Christos living at 6 Lyndhurst Street; he would become naturalized on June 21, 1926. In 1935, he was back on Southern Avenue, now at 111. His registration with the Selective Service as part of 1942’s “Old Man’s Draft” reveals yet another address: 34 Rosedale Street. He had aged, described as bald and wearing glasses, with a scar on the back of his neck. He identified the “person who will always know where you are” as his brother-in-law Kostas Karalekas, also of 34 Rosedale Street and formerly of 111 Southern. It seems the men lived and worked together from early on: in the 1910 census, Kostas identified himself as a “fruit dealer, employer,” Christos’s occupation as well.
Christos’s was a life in transit. According to his wife Antigoni’s 1949 naturalization petition, she and Christos married in Athens, not America, on November 29, 1936, and had a son, John, born in Greece on May 1, 1940. These dates indicate multiple voyages for Christos, as naturalized citizens were prohibited from living abroad for this length of time. On August 3, 1940, he arrived alone in New York aboard the Exmoor, returning to 34 Rosedale Street, his address per the 1942 and 1943 Boston city directories.
Christos vanished from the directories until 1951, but Antigoni’s immigration paperwork placed him at 17 Norfolk Street in Dorchester from at least 1946. In 1951, Antigoni and Christos, an “exporter,” still lived there.
On her visa, Antigoni had declared her “plans to reside permanently” here, but on August 30, 1952, Christos, 62, and his family sailed for Greece aboard the aptly named Homeland. At some point Christos came back, only to return to Greece in August 1954 aboard the Nea Hellas, with “the expectation of staying for a year.” On both legs of this sojourn, Christos again reported his address as 34 Rosedale Street. Apparently he gave up the Norfolk address after Antigoni’s departure. We confirmed one more voyage in 1958, when Christos and John, now 18, returned to America aboard the Olympia.
Perhaps no document reveals more about Christos’s life than the one filed upon his death: a State Department Report of the Death of an American Citizen. Christos died of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 30, 1972, nearly 83, in Athens’s Timios Stavros Clinic. His last known American address was in Lexington, Massachusetts, but when he died, Christos was “residing abroad with relatives”—likely Antigoni, who lived in New Smyrni, Athens. Around this time, their son lived in Poughkeepsie, New York, an employee at Vassar College.
In all his years in Dorchester, Christos never lived outside a quarter-mile radius of Codman Square, yet he and his family spent decades with an ocean between them. As was the case with so many of his countrymen, Christos appears to have come to America always intending to return home. In death, he did. Christos John Alexander was buried in the First Cemetery of Athens, in his homeland of Greece.
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