US naturalization — November 29, 1948
Less than three years after arrival, Alina was naturalized as a US citizen on November 29, 1948, at the US District Court, New York City — Petition No. 570871, Certificate No. 6869928, Alien Registration No. 6547776. Her US residence at the time was 370 Fort Washington Avenue, NYC — Washington Heights, the same Upper Manhattan neighborhood where her niece-by-marriage Mya Durso would later attend Mother Cabrini High School. She signed the certificate in her own hand: Alina Jeannopoulos.
Alina Jeannopoulos — wife of Takis (Panagiotis) Jeannopoulos — was born 24 July 1919 in Łuck (Luck), Poland, a town in eastern Volhynia, then in interwar Poland, now Lutsk in Ukraine. She arrived in New York on 14 March 1946 aboard the USAT George W. Goethals sailing from Le Havre, France.
Her route — Łuck → Le Havre → New York — sketches the kind of life a Polish-born woman of her generation lived through and survived. Łuck was occupied by the Soviets (1939–41), then the Germans (1941–44), then the Soviets again. Many ethnic Poles fled west during or after the war. By March 1946 she had reached France, where the USAT George W. Goethals — a US Army Transport vessel running scheduled postwar passages between Le Havre and New York — was carrying war brides, displaced persons, and returning American servicemen across the Atlantic. She was on one of those crossings, reuniting with the husband who had been waiting for her in New York.
Washington Heights — the multigenerational household
Per Aline Pepe’s May 2026 testimony, Alina and Takis shared a Washington Heights apartment building with Aline’s family — and with the matriarch Eftyhia, who lived with them. Aline’s 1948 naturalization certificate’s address — 370 Fort Washington Avenue — is almost certainly the building. The household functioned as a Greek-Anatolian-Polish family compound: Takis + Alina + Nene in one apartment, John Lazare + Ines + their three daughters in another, weekends at “the bungalow” beach house together.
Aline’s one direct anecdote about her aunt Alina — the famous “Aunt Alina crazy” story — comes from this household. As a small child Aline had been jumping off the top bunk onto her elder sister’s beds, making such a racket downstairs that Alina (entertaining company) came up and spanked her with the back of her shoe. Eftyhia then came into the room to comfort the crying child:
“As I was crying off the spanking I’d gotten with the back of my Aunt’s shoe, Nene came into the room and managed to say in her heavily accented English ‘Aunt Alina crazy’, accompanied with the recognisably circular hand gesture near her head. Of course that followed with a hefty dose of peppermint candy.” — Aline Pepe, 2026-05-24
The strict aunt, the indulgent grandmother. Per Aline, Eftyhia thought Alina was a bit much.
How they likely met
Takis was at the University of Paris medical school from 1931 through at least November 1937 (when his Doctorat Universitaire was certified). Alina, born in 1919, would have been a young woman in interwar Europe through those same years. The most natural reading of the dates is that they met somewhere in 1930s Europe — most likely in Paris — and married before or during WWII. He returned to the US (his 1940 draft registration places him in NYC). She was stuck in occupied Poland-then-France through the war years, until the 1946 USAT George W. Goethals sailing finally brought her across.
Discovering that Takis married — and married a Polish-born refugee with a war-survival arc as fraught as Sophie Jakowska’s on his brother Constantine’s side — recasts his place in the family record. They had no children, but they had a household. In Manhattan, they shared an apartment building with the matriarch Eftyhia and with John and Ines’s family of three daughters one floor away. On Long Island, they were the owners of the bungalow at 104 Asharoken Avenue, Northport — Takis and Alina’s beach house on Long Island Sound, where each weekend they hosted the broader family and where Eftyhia would eventually die in December 1968. Aline’s published column on the bungalow names Alina as the aunt at the piano.
February 16, 2010 — the last keeper of the bungalow
Alina outlived Takis by 33 years. He died of cancer in November 1976; she would not die until February 16, 2010, in her 90th year, at the bungalow itself. Her obituary line — relayed to the family record in May 2026 — reads:
JEANNOPOULOS — Alina, (née Bacho) of Asharoken-Northport on February 16, 2010, in her 90th year. Loving wife of the late Dr. Takis Jeannopoulos.
That single line opens three things at once. It gives the family her maiden name (Bacho — a previously open question) for the first time. It fixes her death date precisely (also previously open). And it places her death at Asharoken-Northport itself — the bungalow.
The Polish refugee who had crossed the Atlantic in 1946 specifically to come back to the husband she had been separated from by the war outlived him by three decades and stayed on at the Long Island Sound bungalow alone for those decades — the last keeper of the family’s summer house, the last family member at 104 Asharoken Avenue before the deed left the family with her.
She is buried — open. The bungalow was sold sometime after February 16, 2010.
She is almost certainly deceased by 2026 — born 1919, she would be 107.
