We will keep searching for the lost grave of our uncle, who died in 1915 and deserves to be remembered
Memorial Day weekend for our family, as with so many others, is steeped in ritual. It was designed to honor those who served in the military, but has also become a time to remember family members as well, while providing an unofficial start to summer.
Millions of people visit the graves of dead relatives, including people they knew and cherished and miss so much the ache is very real. We also pay our respects to those we only know from family stories, often told and retold on this weekend of the year.
We deposit flowers, real and plastic, and clean those cold stone markers while checking dates and spellings yet again.
This year, I once again joined my sister Mary, who has been the chief force behind keeping our family tradition alive. Alive. That is an odd word for this action, this time spent walking about on matted grass and gravel roads at cemeteries in eastern South Dakota.
While the job has been done in much the same way every time, there was a change, or at least an attempt to alter it, in 2013.
We looked for the grave of Ray Hunter Lavin, the infant son of my grandfather Thomas Henry Lavin (seen above in his World War I uniform, two years after the death of his son Ray Hunter Lavin - photo courtesy of Tom Lawrence) and his first wife, Margaret Hunter.
That first son has always had a ghostly presence in family lore. The unhappy marriage of his parents lasted about two years. After their divorce, Tom served in Europe during World War I, where he was wounded and earned the Purple Heart. Mom cherished that honor, and the medal remains with our family today.
He then returned home to find his second bride, my grandmother Evelyn Mae Nelson. They had four daughters; the youngest was my mother Marcella. For years, she and her sisters speculated about the legend of their missing half-brother.
Their mother died in 1936. Tom Lavin struggled with alcohol and painful memories of the war, the kind that had him awaken screaming, Mom recalled. He raised his girls with the help of relatives, and refused to discuss anything about his first marriage with his daughters.
They were left to guess. They asked relatives, who offered some clues, but nothing concrete.
The girls wondered if the brother was rich, which had been hinted at, and would someday visit them. He might have settled in California, they thought. But it was just a mist, a guess and dreams.
When I worked for the Argus Leader in the mid-1990s, I was stationed in Brookings, and spent a lot of time in the Brookings County Courthouse. I checked records, and discovered that my grandfather had indeed been married twice, and had fathered a child with his first wife in 1915. But, it turned out, the baby died shortly after birth.
No other records were readily available, but it was finally clear there was no wealthy relative in California, or anywhere else. Just a lost child, a mystery that we couldn’t solve.
A few years later, my sister Anita, who studied our family genealogy, decided to look into it further. She discovered the boy’s name: Ray Hunter Lavin. But there was no record of why he died, or where he was buried.
Still, Anita did heroic work to uncover our family history, and it means a lot to all of us.
Anita died in 2012 at 55. It was a tragedy that deeply hurt our entire family, even after nearly two decades of witnessing her brave battle against breast cancer.
It was a time of painful loss, and remains so today. You will never forget the people you love — they are always alive in your memory and hearts.
That’s part of this weekend, too.
Ray Hunter Lavin died on Sept. 23, 1915. In 2013, I checked with a kind man in Brookings who keeps records of the two main cemeteries there. He was willing to look at the records, but found no mention of little Ray Lavin.
We have looked in the cemeteries, and checked a list at the Flandreau cemetery and online listings of Brookings, Elkton and Flandreau cemeteries, the towns where my grandfather had family connections. Nothing.
We wonder where the infant’s body ended up. Was he buried in Brookings, where his parents lived? In Elkton or Flandreau, where Tom Lavin had family?
Did his mother’s family take the tiny body back to her native Iowa, where she returned after the divorce? She lived until 1978, when I was 20, but I had no idea who she was then. Margaret remarried, and had several more children, according to Ancestry.com.
I would certainly guess the loss of her firstborn, when she was around 20 years old, was a haunting memory for the next 63 years of her life. I’m glad we didn’t disturb her or evoke painful memories.
My grandpa, as far as we know, didn’t visit the grave. He died the day before Halloween in 1957. I was born the next year, and named for him.
My mom was devoted to him, but for me, he has been another ghost who I have learned about in bits and pieces. In photos, he is stoic and unsmiling, providing us with a glimpse of who he really was.
I share his name and a few stories from Mom, who worshipped him, and Dad, who knew and liked his father-in-law, even if he had been a bit of a rogue at times.
Our uncle Ray is almost completely shrouded in mystery. It seems very possible, maybe even likely, that Ray Lavin’s grave has been forgotten for more than a century.
We feel a need to change that, to add a visit to his resting place as part of our annual cemetery tour.
More than 30 years ago, Mary took the reins of it from Mom, who every year, on Memorial Day weekend, visited the graves of her parents, her grandparents and other relatives. They are buried in Elkton and Flandreau, towns on the edge of the South Dakota-Minnesota border where immigrants came in the 1870s and ’80s, like the Irish clan who spawned her dad, and the Danes who raised her mother.
We also stopped in Estelline, where Dad’s Norwegian relatives are buried. He knew almost all of them, and never tired of discussing these people, even though they had been dead several decades. They were very alive in his memories.
As Dad aged, it became clear to me that he knew more people in graveyards than he did in towns and cities, and he enjoyed driving by the final homes of their mortal remains. He explained what they did for a living, how they talked and what he most remembered about them.
At times I resisted, shuddering at yet another trip down memory lane with the ghosts, but I often drove him to the cemeteries. One summer day in 2011, we visited graveyards in several small towns, and he had friends and/or relatives in all of them.
Mary and I long to have him with us every year, to point out where graves are at, and to tell us vivid stories about the people in them. But he could not join, or aid, us this time.
Dad died at 92 in 2013, and ended up atop the hill in Estelline in the cemetery he so enjoyed visiting. We are comforted by the fact he lived and enjoyed a long life, and was resting in a place where he found peace and comfort.
Mom, who died at 65 in 1995, was less enamored of cemeteries. But she strongly believed in honoring her family. She visited their graves in a very businesslike manner, ensuring they were clear of weeds, that the flowers were straight and that the chore was properly done.
Mary has done most of the work for years now. I now join her, and Grace has come along in recent years. It’s a chore, and the plastic flowers cost a bit, but we enjoy the time together. The feeling of carrying on a family tradition grows stronger every year.
We always start at the Flandreau cemetery after a stop at the best bakery in the state. In the past, I have walked through the oldest part of the graveyard, which includes a man who died at 97 in 1895, meaning he was born in 1797 or 1798. Another grave proudly proclaimed the man buried there was a veteran of the Confederate Army.
We have also stopped at the Indian cemetery on the edge of town, a place where I once interviewed Richard “Chuck” Allen, then the chairman of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe. Chuck, a truly engaging and interesting man, explained his dual faith to me in the mid-1990s. He said he felt comfortable both as a Christian and a believer in traditional Native spiritualism.
Over the years, we have visited two cemeteries in Elkton and two in Brookings, where uncles, aunts and some cousins that we knew so well and spent a great deal of time with over the years, are buried. It always saddens us to be reminded they are gone, and seeing their names on a gravestone is a brutal reminder of their absence.
The final stop in Estelline is always particularly emotional, with Mom and Dad once again joined side-by-side. But the very ritual itself, and the feeling we were doing something they wanted us to do, eases that discomfort.
But we can’t find where Ray Lavin is at, and we feel a need to keep trying, keep searching, trying to discover the resting place of our uncle. We want to place flowers there, and pass along a message that we know he was a member of our family, and we cherish him, too.
He shouldn’t be a lost little boy.
Fourth-generation South Dakotan Tom Lawrence has written for several newspapers and websites in South Dakota and other states and contributed to The New York Times, NPR, The London Telegraph, The Daily Beast and other media outlets. Reprint with permission.
