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Zatarains in New Orleans

Posted by Paul Parish <gaydancer@aol.com> on Thu, 18 Sep 2008, in response to Zatarain Descendant, posted by Paulette Gaudry on Sun, 09 Feb 2003

Hello, cousine: Helen Zatarain Schwartz was my grandmother, and Aimee Muldrey, her older sister, I remember well as the most lovable of "the sofa people" at family Christmas parties in New Orleans, where my grandparents (Joe and Helen Schwartz) lived on Belfast street near Carrollton and Canal. "Munner" was what we called your grandmother. She was an old lady when I was a child, and since we lived 200 miles north, in Mississippi, I did not know her well -- but she was mild, and approachable. She had been Head Nurse at Hotel Dieu (one of hte major NOLA hospitals) and had a serene considerable intelligence and personal beauty, of the Loretta Young type. All of the Zatarain women were lovely, with beautiful bone structure, shining eyes. Her father, jules, died young (legend has it he caught cold in the Rex Parade and died of it, but my mother liked to embroider stories); her mother Mary Margaret Raftery, remarried a man named Burke and had two more children, Bea and a boy whose name I'm not sure of. She divorced Mr Burke -- he gambled --and retired to a big country house near Chattawa Mississippi across the Tangipahoa River from the convent school, Our Lady of the Pines, where both my grandmother and later my Aunt Janie went to school. I have Mary margaret Raftery's copy of Milton's "Paradise Lost," inscribed in Palmer Method hand "To Mary Margaret Raftery from Mrs. Sabina Golden 1889". The inscription continues in hte same hand (her own, I suspect) To my dear Naomi Cecielia Zatarain from your ever devoted Mother 9-4-1935.
Naomi gave the book to me in August, 1968, just before I left for England: I was the Rhodes Scholar in the family, and she probably wanted me to have a physical link to my homeland and people and a feel for family traditions. Naomi was the youngest of Munner's sisters; she never married: in old age became a devotee of Blessed Claude de la Colombiere, a relic of whose she sent with my father into the hospital when he had major surgery. She inscribed the book (different handwriting) "To dear Paul Merrel Parish -- with love and prayers, and fond memory of your devoted great grand mother, Mary Margaret R. Zatarain Burke, sincerely, Naomi Cecelia 8-21-68.

I have lived in Berkeley, California since 1973. Where do you live?

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