Paternal Ancestors

Unfortunately I don’t have as much detailed information or number of pictures on my Dad’s side as I do from my Mom’s. I have a second cousin who has a safe full of information in his basement but he is apparently too busy to look for it. I am however grateful that he provided this version of our family name:

“Our family name comes from the French  ‘Monsieur’. At some point in the 18th century a French pirate landed on the island of Spetse, Greece. The only thing we know about him was that his first name was Lazaros. On the island, he fell in love with a girl who was engaged to a local guy. Being absolutely head over heels with her he decided to challenge her fiance to a knife fight. Happily, he won the fight, he married the girl, settled on the island and this was the beginning of our family. As no one on the island could pronounce his French family name they began calling him just ‘Monsieur’ and this very soon became Moussiou. 

His grandson, also called Lazaros, took arms in the 1821 rising of the Greeks against the Turks. He filled a small tender with explosives and blew up the Turkish flagship off Samos (this is written in the history textbooks of the Greek high schools) . He also had a family battle flag. This flag was in Athens until the early seventies in the antique store of a distant relative of ours, an old lady called Moussiou. After her death, the flag was then taken to the Spetses Museum where it is exhibited. Also the name of Lazaros is written in the Libro D’Oro of the Island.

Right after the Liberation of Greece our ancestor left Spetses for Romania where they became shipowners of barges on the Danube. Romania  was then a very rich country and the Delta of the Danube controlled all the commerce of the Austrian Empire. It was there that the ‘i’ from Moussiou was ommitted. The relatives that remained in Spetses kept to the original name of Moussiou. Another lady a few years ago was telling me of a woman in the town of Kranidi (inland accross the water from Spetses) called Eleni Moussiou who had told her that she also descended from a French pirate from Spetses (fancy that!).”