My paternal aunt Terri Ann was only 36 years old when she died in a car accident, in the summer of 1999. When I was born two years later, I was named Fallon Ann Brannon, which was my dad’s way of commemorating her.
Apparently, I carry more than her name. My dad, Wellington Brannon, now 65, told me that he sees the spirit of his younger sister in me, in my sense of humor, my work ethic, and the way I am with people. In his mind, he can see his sister working hard — she always kept a job, he said — and enjoying herself, laughing and joking easily with people. “Terri really liked to have fun,” he said.
But my dad’s visual memories of his sister are fading, he said.
He had taken the funeral program home after they’d laid her to rest in the Mt. Olivet Mausoleum in Gentilly but now he doesn’t know if he still has it. The family also had held onto her senior yearbook and her prom and graduation photos. They had a shelf full of family albums and keepsakes of times he’d spent with his younger sister.
Katrina’s floodwaters took all of it.
Lost memories
As many locals know, after Hurricane Katrina submerged 80% of the city, some people waded through floodwater to reach safety and find shelter at the Superdome. Others witnessed death on the streets. Even those who evacuated beforehand found themselves stranded in unfamiliar places for months or years, trying to find work and attend school in new homes while also trying to be part of New Orleans’ recovery.
Within people’s flooded homes, tangible items like mementoes and photos were washed away or pushed into sodden piles of muck. In some areas, like the Lower 9th Ward, the city didn’t allow residents to return for months.
The losses of family photos changed the way the city approaches its annual All Saints’ Day on November 1st. It’s natural to long for the photos that were ruined as we pay homage to our loved ones. I know my dad does. He worries that as his memory fades, he will forget the details of Terri Ann’s face, the way she dressed, or how she grinned at him.
But in some ways, maybe it makes the holiday even more powerful, because All Saints’ Day draws families together through unseen connections. On that day, we celebrate those who have become ancestors and those gathered by the family tomb who inherited family characteristics: a nose, a laugh, a singing voice.
Maybe, because my dad lost albums of photos of him and his sister, he was able to see early signs of her in us kids, my cousins and I. He could see a part of her that still endured, within us.
More than 300 years ago, French Catholic colonists brought the All Saints’ Day ritual to New Orleans, as a holiday they called La Toussaint. The holiday is meant to honor Christian saints who have ascended to heaven. Like Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, in Mexico, All Saints’ Day gives those of us living on earth a designated time to spend with our ancestors in the afterlife.
Within the Catholic Church, All Saints’ Day is a Holy Day of Obligation, where parishioners are required to attend Mass and visit the gravesites of deceased loved ones. Each year, the Archdiocese of New Orleans publishes a schedule of when the archbishop or local priests will visit local cemeteries to walk through and bless the graves.
But in French Catholic New Orleans, All Saints’ Day, like many Catholic rituals, became a citywide tradition.
It used to be an official city holiday. Municipal offices were closed and schoolkids had the day off. Some families would pack a picnic lunch and head to the cemetery, to clean, whitewash and decorate loved ones’ gravesites with candles and yellow chrysanthemums as a day of remembrance. Lifelong New Orleanians remember teenage years when they’d grab a shovel, a scrub brush, and a bucket and head to the cemeteries, where they’d stand outside, waiting to be hired by families who wanted their people’s graves cleaned for the day.
To preservationist Robert Florence, the president of NOLA Historic Tours, it makes sense why throngs of New Orleanians head to the city’s cemeteries on All Saints’ Day. Though Mardi Gras is the most well-known local holiday, All Saints’ Day may be the day that most reflects the city, he said.
“It fits into the whole spirit-world vibe of New Orleans. It’s part of this whole tapestry of the city’s celebratory relationship with the dead,” Florence said.
Florence moved to New Orleans from New York after discovering he had family history in the city, which led him to dig into historical New Orleans genealogical research. That drew him to the city’s cemeteries and their celebrated architecture and traditions, which he wrote about in a 1997 book, New Orleans Cemeteries: Life in the Cities of the Dead, which included photos by his brother, Mason Florence.
Because of his interest in preservation, Florence has restored several tombs in St. Louis Cemeteries No. 1 and No. 2. He sees the city’s famous cities of the dead as a perfect place to focus on genealogy, because some families visit the same tomb for generations to tell family stories. “They perpetuate family genealogical narratives for centuries,” Florence said.
Genealogy and cemeteries
My friend Darrin Francois, a history buff, also finds cemeteries fascinating on All Saints’ Day.
Using genealogy archives, Francois, 26, has now uncovered about three-quarters of his immediate family history, dating back six generations. So on All Saints’ Day, he has more stops to make, as he tries to visit and leave flowers at the graves of his forebears, who are laid to rest across town, in Mount Olivet and two in-ground graveyards: the city-owned Holt Cemetery by City Park, and Providence Memorial Park on Airline Drive in Metairie.
Because of his love of history, studying genealogy seems to come naturally to Francois, one of my classmates from Tuskegee University. He started in 2018, through Ancestry online accounts. After I told him about my Aunt Terri, he surprised my dad with a few digital photos of her, then traced back our ancestral lineage a few generations.
Inspired by a friend who took a DNA test to learn more about her ancestral lineage, Darrin did the same. After graduation, he moved back to New Orleans, his family tree in hand. He soon began traveling across southern Louisiana to meet distant relatives, who gave him photographs of their shared family members.
When he returned to New Orleans, he’d write about his genealogical journeys on social media.
Then the DMs started rolling in. Often, he happily responded by hopping onto Ancestry and doing more research. People would give him a list of family names; he’d look them up and create entire family trees.
At one point, I really pushed him to advertise his services. But he feels conflicted about that, because he sees genealogy as a labor of love. “I just really like helping people discover their history,” he said.
Familial traditions continue
Ann Macdonald’s parents passed away in the 1990s, three years apart. Her father, William “Bill” Macdonald was a staunch music lover, who enjoyed the sounds of John Coltrane and Lenny Kravitz. Macdonald, 64, used to feel the presence of her dad when she listened to his music: he had a collection of more than 300 music albums, which became hers. But all were lost during Hurricane Katrina.
“It broke my heart when I came back to the house,” Macdonald said. The house took in five feet of floodwater, devastating her dad’s music collection and her mom’s carefully catalogued family history.
Her mother, Cora Macdonald, kept all of their family pictures in a box and created rows of photo albums by chronological years. “She had pictures of when my brothers and I were children, when she and my daddy were dating and got married,” she said. The family photos dated back three generations and included photos of her great grandparents. An historian of sorts, her mother kept careful records in the kitchen as well, writing down all of her recipes on index cards and keeping them all in a black and white composition notebook that also ended up underwater.
About 20 of her mother’s photo albums were neatly shelved in a ground-floor closet in the family home, where Ann had grown up and where she still lives. Though much of that closet was not salvageable after Katrina, Ann Macdonald was able to “rescue” some photos, which remain in their plastic sleeves inside once-sodden albums that are stacked in plastic bins.
She can’t discern the faces on many of the photos that remain. Still, they feel valuable. “The paper is all crumbly, but I can’t bring myself to just throw them away,” she said.
Macdonald has found new ways to keep memories alive. She restored and maintains her father’s garden. The yard’s evergreen camellia bushes, with their glossy green leaves and big flowers, bring her back to her childhood, when she would watch her parents tend to them.
And because her parents were married on Christmas Eve, she hosts an annual family dinner in their honor, creating new family memories and maybe even using digital music services to again play some of her dad’s favorite music. “All of my family has always taken care of each other. And we continue to after so many years,” she said.
Community photography honors Black Katrina survivors
In 2008, the city’s famous husband-wife photography team Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick launched the multimedia project Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster, which used digital imagery to show the monumental impacts of the storm on New Orleans residents.
The two have spent four decades documenting Black life in the city of New Orleans. They documented Black churches in the 9th Ward, people working on the docks, and city cultural traditions like jazz-funeral processions and Sunday afternoon social aid and pleasure club parades. They have keen connections to many events they photographed: often, the couple can pick up a photo and then tell you a story about what happened before the shutter clicked and what ensued afterward.
Before Calhoun and McCormick evacuated before Katrina, they packed their photographs and negatives into plastic bins that they stacked onto high shelves. But floodwaters reached eight feet in their part of the Lower 9th Ward, soaking two-thirds of their archive. At their son’s suggestion, they froze bags of the waterlogged and mildewed images, stopping the deterioration.
As it turned out, within the plastic bins, Mother Nature created a soup of water and heat that changed the negatives into a different kind of artwork. Five years later, Calhoun and McCormick began to scan and print from those negatives, which carry splotches of mold, shadows from other images and vivid colors. They became abstractions of the original photos. As McCormick has said, “The images represent different forms of light that guide and sustain us through trials and tribulations.”
Also, one-third of their collection survived Katrina and so they have been able to supply photos to New Orleans residents who had lost every image. “Having some records is always better than none,” said Calhoun, who takes their documentarian roles seriously. “I’m honored that we were able to keep our presence in our community,” he said.
Terri’s memory lives on
Terri had two children, my cousins Dorion Russell and Amanda Cooper. Dorion was 14 years old when Terri passed away, while Amanda was only four years old and doesn’t have much memory of her mom.
They too lost photos of their mother. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any tangible items, but I have specific memories,” said Dorion, now 41 years old.
He vaguely recalls Terri getting married to Amanda’s dad. He remembers his mom coming to his sports games. Here and there, a relative will find an image of them that helps bring back more memories. But otherwise, he doesn’t remember a lot.
But Robbin Irwin has a cascade of recollections, when asked about her best friend Terri.
She doesn’t need a single photograph to prompt those memories. Robbin and Terri were both born in April and grew up together, attending Our Lady of Lourdes elementary school as classmates. They were extremely close — so much so that people thought of them as sisters. “When you would see me, you’d see her. And vice versa,” Robbin said.
She’ll never forget the day Terri died, she said. While Irwin sat in her cubicle at work, about to clock out, my family kept calling her, asking if she knew where Terri was. If anyone knew Terri’s whereabouts, it would be Robbin, my family told her.
It was unlike Terri not to stay in touch. So Robbin got an eerie feeling that something had happened.
Turns out that Terri had been gone since the night before. She’d driven to a late-night pharmacy to retrieve medicine. A driver ran a stop sign and T-boned the driver’s side of Terri’s car. She died from the impact.
“That broke my heart. My friend was gone,” said Robbin, who still avoids side streets late at night, thinking of what happened to Terri.
Robbin told me about the two of them going out together and how they often wore matching outfits. The stories kept coming. Memories shared between generations, like we’re supposed to do this time of year.
As we talked, I found that I needed to hit the mute button, so that Robbin wouldn’t hear me sobbing. Tears ran down my face, for the aunt I’d never known.
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