Last week I received a copy of a letter a father wrote to his daughter on her birthday. The letter was written by George Azar Khoury in 1966 to his youngest daughter from his first marriage to Lucia Simon. George is my grandfathers first cousin and emigrated to Arizona via Mexico early in the 20th century.
George has always fascinated me while I've been on this journey because he was one of the first relatives I found that had emigrated. I found several instances of him coming through border crossings from Mexico right up until the 1950's.
The letter George sent to his daughter was to wish her a happy birthday. He also tells her about her birth and the death of her mother only days after her birth. He wasn't the most eloquent of writers but you could feel his love and pain through his words.....to tell you the truth it brought a tear to my eye reading the letter. Unfortunately his wife Lucia passed away four days after the birth of her child from renal failure. George writes in the letter that her grief is what killed her as another child had severely hurt herself a couple of days before the birth.
Its amazing what you can learn from a letter. In this letter he writes how when he was young he was studying in a seminary to become a priest but found it wasn't for him as his father had passed away and he had to return home and look after the family. A few years later the village priest who was his uncle passed away and the villagers ask him to become the priest. This is an important thing as at this time our village priests had always been from our village. This has made me curious now to find out who the priest have been in our village church. Derdghaya has supplied many priests and nuns over the years.
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