Mary Magdalene

I received some photos from my Aunt Betty today. She's one of my father's two sisters. She and Aunt Dorothy didn't know of their brother's death until I found their addresses in July 2007 and wrote letters to them... 8 months after I learned of his death myself.

My father lived in Venezuela the last few years of his life. He died in October 2002, and no one in the U.S. knew about it until 2006. That's when my sister Monica in Venezuela contacted our brother Lloyd in New York and told him he had died 4 years earlier. I heard the news a few months later from our sister Ivonne who lives in New Jersey. Ivonne also told me of yet another sister, Lorena, who was a lawyer and now is a nun. Lorena also lives in Venezuela, along with our brothers, Mark and Matthew. My father had 9 children in all.

My wife and I met Ivonne and her husband last January. It was the first time I had seen Ivonne since 1966, when I was 10 and she was 2. I am hoping to meet Monica for the first time this summer when she and her husband and baby boy come to visit. She saw our father for the first time at his funeral. In our correspondence, she asked me if I had any photos of our grandmother, Mary Magdalene - our father's mother. I had never seen a photo of her myself, until today.

Mary Magdalene Kozlowski, who changed her name to Mamie McNair, married Lloyd William Burwick in March 1926. She died of cancer in 1939. Here are some photos of her and my grandfather in the late 1920s, when they lived in California.