Although I am solely a blend of various Eastern European nations, all of which make me Caucasian, there are four main countries from which my ethnicity is derived. My ancestors from Norway, Scotland, Italy and Austria all converged upon the United States in the early 20th century for a multitude of reasons. The Norwegian farmers sought better in the United States, so did the Scottish coal miners, and the Italian factory workers. Perhaps the most interesting though is my Austrian family, of which only two are known to have escaped the Holocaust, my grandmother included. Each of those four Branches make up a roughly equal share of my heritage and each has a last name which corresponds to the generation that immigrated to the United States.
For example, The Tveter’s were the generation of my Norwegian family that came here to the United States. They were primarily farmers and carpenters as far back as is known by family and owned a farm in the countryside surrounding the Norwegian city of Trondheim. Preceding WWI, my great grandfather Trygve Norman Tveter came to the United States with his mother, father, younger brother and older brother. They settled in Chicago, Illinois and while Trygve’s father remained a carpenter, Trygve himself secured himself a job at an advertising agency. When WWI came around, Trygve and his older brother enlisted in the military. Trygve’s brother was killed unfortunately when German U-boats attacked the ship he was serving on. Trygve himself survived the war. He had served in the 42nd or “Rainbow Division” of the US military, 149th regiment, which operated field artillery along the trenches in Europe. After the war, he came home and married my great-grandmother Margie-Ann Hinman and started a family in Pleasantville, NY, a suburb of New York City. They had three children, one of which was my Grandmother Irene Tveter.
Her husband and my paternal grandfather John Maxwell, was born in the United States in Farrell, Pennsylvania in the 1920’s. He was born to a Scottish father and American mother. His father William Maxwell and grandfather Archibald Maxwell had come from Scotland as coal miners in 1864, when the Irish immigrants reduced the wages by taking mining jobs for less pay after the potato famine. Interestingly, William and Archie Maxwell had descended from a chain of Scottish royalty who had eventually gotten the short end of the stick in terms of inheritance. As my father explained it, the eldest son of a household inherits the greatest share of the family fortune, and in a family of eight brothers, the youngest brother ends up with very little. So after several rounds of my ancestors being the youngest sibling, who therefore inherits the least, they became quite poor and eventually had to look for work. So after the work they found became unprofitable, they moved to Western Pennsylvania in the United States where William was once again a coal miner and Archibald began work at a factory that would eventually manufacture torpedoes in WWI. They were able to put my grandfather John Maxwell all the way through college and he was able to obtain first a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Muskingum University in Ohio followed by a Master’s degree in plant physiology from Ohio State. Following the completion of his education, he moved away for a teaching job at none other than Pleasantville High School, where he met his future wife Irene Tveter.
Irene was 18 and a senior in high school at the time that they met, and John was 27 and had been teaching there for only a few years. Although to some it sounds creepy that a young girl would marry her high school professor, to them it was true love. After my grandmother attended college for a year in Ohio, she dropped out to marry John in Mayville, NY, where he was then teaching. Years later, they had three children, my uncle Darrell in 1961, aunt Mary Beth in 1962 and my father Mark Maxwell in 1964.
Moving to my mother’s side, the Italian Avitabile family (pronounced ah-vee-tah-buh-lay) moved over from Naples in Southern Italy around 1910 to better themselves financially in the United States and escape the unstable political situation. My paternal grandfather and his two brothers and two sisters were all born in the Bronx where my great grandparents had settled. My grandfather Albert and his siblings helped their parents run a produce market in Harlem to support the family. Eventually, Albert was able to attend CUNY (possibly CCNY) and became an Industrial Engineer in the city. On vacation in the Catskills one fateful day, he met my grandmother, Grete Korn.
My grandmother Grete or “Gigi” as I know her and her two older sisters were born in Vienna, Austria in the late 1920’s. The family owned a shop in Vienna that hand made and sold all kinds of brushes from paintbrushes, to shoe brushes to hairbrushes. I have attached a picture of my Austrian family standing outside the shop in Vienna before my grandmother was born. As some reading this may have guessed, my Austrian ancestors were Jewish and were persecuted by the Nazi regime. Austria was one of the first territories to be occupied by Germany, so my family was in very dangerous territory where they were captured and sent to a concentration camp. The exact camp is unknown but it’s known to have been near Brussels, France. My grandmother and one of her sisters Sophie were able to escape to a territory outside German occupation on what was called the Kindertransport, which allowed children under a certain age to leave Germany before the Nazi regime clamped down further on the Jews. Grete, aged eleven, and Sophie, aged twelve, took refuge in London and were able to work for the Allied military translating German letters and eventually attend high school in London. Unfortunately the rest of the family did not make it out of the camps. My grandmother, after the war was educated at Oxford University where she obtained a degree in library science. For her service to the Allied Powers, she was cleared to move to the United States where she became a librarian in Midtown Manhattan.
She met my grandfather Albert, as mentioned before, at a vacation in the Catskills and after dating back in New York City and falling in Love, the two married and eventually moved to Yonkers to start a family where they had my uncle Steven Avitabile in 1959 and my mother Tina Avitabile in 1964.
So while my parents were both able to attend college relatively easily and met at SUNY New Paltz, there was much of a struggle to get them to that point. Many branches of my family all had to converge from different parts of Europe to the American Northeast in order for me to be where I am today. The Norwegian Tveter’s, Scottish Maxwell’s, Italian Avitabile’s and Austrian Korn’s all eventually ended up in New York in their search for a better life. So here I am, with an amazingly supportive family and countless educational opportunities, attending the Macaulay Honors College in New York City thanks to the survival of my ancestors through all the hardships they endured staring lives here. Some people don’t have the opportunity to work themselves up to a good standing in life, so they do it for the future generations of their family, and I’m proud to say that I’m well off today thanks to the amazing people I’ve descended from.
