In my imagination, the search for our family’s roots that brought my son and me to this tiny village would lead us to a church, where a priest in a long black cassock would pore through dusty records for information about my maternal grandfather, the man we knew only as George Eridon.
The trek had taken 5,054 air miles, followed by 41 more through Transylvanian forests and Carpathian mountains on roughly-paved highways that deteriorated into graveled roads that sometimes became little more than rutted paths; surfaces more suitable for the frequent wagons drawn by plodding horses we passed than for our rented Peugeot.
A tilted sign welcomed us to Apold. A church building perched high on a hill. But the congregation had long ago drifted away and the 13th century building was being renovated as a museum.
No church meant no priest to pore through dusty records. So our next best hope lay down the hill at the Consiliul Local Comuna Apold, staffed by civil servants who spoke just enough English to understand we were looking for records about my grandfather. But our questions were met with skeptical looks and universal agreement that Eridon did not sound at all like a Romanian name.
Even tiny Transylvanian villages have desk tops, though. A computer search disclosed that a family named Spiridon had lived here sometime after 1895 before moving to Bucharest. Because officials at Ellis Island were notorious for butchering the names of immigrants who came through there, as my grandfather did in 1910, it was reasonable to suspect that Spiridon had evolved into Eridon.
The address of their house, a clerk said, was 290. We could drive past it, but shouldn’t get out of our car.
“Why not?” I asked.
“It is occupied by gypsies,” he declared, as if that were explanation enough.
We drove down nameless dirt streets that were little more than alleys. The houses were old and tiny, with pastel stucco walls, weathered tiled roofs and satellite dishes. Dusky-skinned residents in colorful clothing stared openly at the pale-skinned strangers cruising their neighborhood.
Not every house was numbered: we passed a 283, a 289 and a 293, but no 290. So all we could do was slow down long enough to take a photo through the Peugeot’s window of a numberless house that might have been the residence of a man who might have been my grandfather and then drive away, with no more hard evidence than when we started more than 5,000 miles ago.
But because I’ve always been more interested in what my descendants might do than what my ancestors might have been, I’ll search no more. So rest in peace, Grandpa.
Whoever you were.
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