The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Joanna Burden's father. He is the only son of Calvin Burden I and Evangeline. Like his father, he runs away from home as a teenager. In the far west he meets Juana, and they have a son, Calvin Burden II, born out of wedlock in 1854. With his father and son he moves to Jefferson in 1866, "to help with the freed negroes" (251).

The first Nathaniel Burrington stands at the head of the ancestral line that reaches an end with Joanna Burden. He is a Unitarian minister in New England who fathers ten children, the youngest of whom is Calvin, who changes his last name from Burrington to Burden.

Evangeline Burden is the first wife of Calvin Burden I, and the mother of their four children. She is also the daughter of a St. Louis, Missouri, family of Huguenot descent, who came west "from Carolina" - the location so many of the leading white families in Yoknapatawpha migrate from (241).

According to Joanna, many Burringtons still live in New Hampshire, although she has only seen these relatives "perhaps three times in her life" (241).

Joanna Burden leaves Jefferson several times a year, for "three and four days," during which visits the various "negro schools and colleges through the south" that she supports (233). There she meets with "the teachers and the students" (234).