My great grandmother Isabell McAvin, who we called Mammaw, used to tell a strange story. One day when she was a young married woman living in New Orleans in the 1920s, a woman knocked on her door. She was middle-aged, had red hair, and held a box. The box held a birthday cake, and she said she had brought it for my great grandfather Joseph. Puzzled, Mammaw accepted the cake for her husband who was at work, and then the woman left--she had not wanted to wait for his return. Mammaw later said, "I should have guessed who she was." Perhaps she should have considering what had happened a few days earlier.
My great grandfather, Joseph McAvin was an engineer who worked for the Grinnell Company designing fire sprinkler systems for buildings. One of the architects he met at work was named William R. Burk. "My mother was named Burk," he casually told the architect, "but she is dead." "Who was your mother?" Burk asked. "Annette Burk," Joseph responded. "Annette is my sister, and she is not dead." Stunned silence.
Soards' New Orleans City Directory, 1927, p. 1024
Let me back up a bit.
In 1892, Joseph's parents John McAvin and Annette Burk were married at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans, a massive brown brick building, the largest church structure in the South. They had known each other from living in the same neighborhood. Annette was an Episcopalian, but had agreed to the Catholic ceremony to please her new husband. Like many young couples in those days, they moved in with John's family into a humble shotgun duplex on Cleveland Avenue. John worked as a laborer, and the couple had two sons, Burk on September 15, 1893, and Theodore, exactly one year later.
St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, 1802 Tulane Ave., New Orleans Image from Wikipedia
But soon Theodore became sick, with a horrible malady, marasmus, that caused his small body to wither. It can be caused by malnutrition, but also by viral, parasitic, or bacterial causes. The stress on his poor parents as they helplessly watched him fade away can only be imagined, and it may have contributed to the breakup of their marriage, for within a couple years Annette left. She left not just her husband John McAvin, but also her surviving son Burk, who was then about four.
Where did Annette go? For years, I speculated about this. She must have found a high roller, I thought. Maybe she moved someplace more glamorous, for New Orleans has always been a fairly provincial place. My second great grandmother Sophie Annette Burk was a mystery. But once I started researching her, many decades after these events unfolded, I got my answer, and it was surprising.
I was able to find her fairly easily because in New Orleans women are listed by their maiden names in many records, even after they are married, due to the French influence on their laws and civil administration. Annette had not gotten very far at all. She "married" another man named Frank Klevorn, a manager of a factory that made cloth sacks, and started another family of six children with him in New Orleans. I put married in quotation marks because she was never divorced from John McAvin. I can imagine him saying something like this:" Fine, leave. But I'm a Catholic, so I'll never give you a divorce. Never. Nor will I ever give you any reason to be able to get one. And you're not taking my son." So Annette had a choice to make. Either stay in the marriage in order to keep her son Burk, or leave and leave her son behind. She chose the latter. The fact that she was not officially married to Frank must have bothered her, because she did try to get a divorce several years later. I sent off for the case file on microfilm through a Family History Center. She claimed a divorce on the grounds of desertion. John McAvin responded, it's not true, and you can't prove it. She couldn't. Case dismissed.
Wait a minute you are thinking. What about Joseph? Where does he fit into all this? I'm getting to it. After Annette left, John went to talk to the priest at St. Joseph's, the grand brick warehouse of Irish Catholics on Tulane Avenue. He asked the priest to change his son's name in the baptismal register, which the priest did. Burk McAvin was forever transformed into Joseph Ferdinand McAvin. After all, if the boy's name had remained Burk, his wife's maiden name, John would constantly be reminded of the wife who left him. Instead, he chose Joseph, which was the baptismal sponsor's name, and Ferdinand. The reason why he chose this middle name is a mystery because there are no other Ferdinands in the Burk or McAvin families, but it may be that the name change occurred on May 30, St. Ferdinand's feast day, and it was the priest's suggestion. Whatever the reason, it was an inspired choice because St. Ferdinand is the patron saint of engineers, young Joseph Ferdinand's future profession. I was able to piece that together because in the church record book, a priest crossed out Burk and wrote in Joseph Ferdinand.
However, John never bothered to change his son's name legally. His civil birth record to this day officially lists his son as Burke [sic] McAvin. But all Catholics know that it's only church records that really count anyway, right? The other thing John did was to devise a story. His son was only four, too little to really understand what was going on between his parents. So he told the boy that his beautiful redheaded mother had died and gone to heaven. John's mother Mary, an immigrant from County Cavan, Ireland, and his sister Kate, who both lived with them were in on the fiction. The boy must never know that his mother left him willingly.
Joseph, though a motherless only child, grew up with loads of attention and support from his father's relations, in part because he was the only grandchild, which was astonishing in an Irish Catholic family. But his father never married again or had any more children, his Uncle Willie's wife Annie never had any children, his Aunt Mary died in trying to bring her first child into the world unsuccessfully, and Aunt Kate was a maiden lady. They all must have lavished lots of care on him. There is a series of photographs that have survived of Joseph taken every year or two in beautiful dress clothes. Perhaps Aunt Kate the seamstress made these outfits. Gradually, Joseph grew up, married Isabell, and had two daughters of his own. As his career flourished, the couple was able to stop renting houses, and they built a house on Catina Street in Lakeview, a new neighborhood. Life was good.
Joseph McAvin upon his confirmation, circa 1906. From the author's collection.
But after his surprise encounter with his mother's brother at his workplace, Joseph learned the truth, that his mother was still alive and living in New Orleans. Soon after she would deliver a birthday cake to his house, an attempt to reconnect after all those years. Joseph's father John had already died several years before this revelation occurred. His grandmother and Aunt Kate were already gone, too. Joseph must have turned to Uncle Willie for an explanation. But he did not have long to either ponder any of this, or to get to know his newly found mother. Joseph had a busy career which caused him to travel. In order to know how to best design the fire sprinkler systems, Joseph would study fires to understand how they spread. On November 6, 1929, he was doing business in West Monroe, Louisiana, about a four hour drive from New Orleans. The country was still reeling from the stock market crash on October 29. While there, he consulted with the local volunteer fire department. He and Dr. Carney, one of the members, jumped in the doctor's car to go out on a fire call. While rushing to cross some railroad tracks, the doctor's car stalled. Both men were killed by the Illinois Central passenger train No. 238. Both men left wives and young children. Joseph was 38 years old.
If he had lived, perhaps Joseph would have had a relationship with his mother and his half brothers and sisters. However, any connection between the family branches died with him, and so my grandmother Dorothy and her sister Mary Bell never knew their paternal grandmother, or her other children. They were never even told their grandmother's married name, Annette Klevorn. She had quietly married Frank Klevorn in 1927 after the death of her first husband John McAvin. The couple took the ferry across the Mississippi River to Gretna and had the ceremony at St. Joseph's Catholic Church there, where no one knew them. I wonder how much of this story Annette told the priest who performed the ceremony? How much did her other family know? That part of the mystery I will never solve.
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