A brief and incomplete biography of Frank:

I don’t have a picture of Frank.  There were pictures once upon a time.  When he and Eva were engaged, Fred reported to Will, “I have a picture of him and Eva has given me some very appreciative descriptions.”  And Barbara was told, probably by Kay, that Eva did keep at least one picture of Frank after the divorce, but we don’t have it now - or, if we do, it is not labeled.

​According to Barbara’s research, Frank was born in November of 1874.  We know very little about his background.  There was a sister or brother or something that gets mentioned in the letters.  I need to find the mention again.

Frank met Eva in New York in the spring of 1909, when they were both living at a boarding house that seems to have attracted musical people.  Frank was a tenor, Eva was a soprano.  Frank, age 34, was immediately smitten with Eva, who was nearly 24.  Mama Margaret was staying with Eva and commented on it in a letter.  Eva took a little longer to fall for Frank.

One factor that surely helped Frank was that he was very close in age to Eva’s older brother Will, whom Eva adored.  And Frank seemed very much like Will to Eva. Another factor that would have helped Frank was that Mama Margaret had to rush off to visit her dying sister Mary in Michigan, leaving Eva to her own devices.  By the time Mama Margaret came back from Mary’s funeral, Frank and Eva were engaged.

They were married the following fall.  In the intervening summer, Alma had rented a cottage in Truro, Massachusetts, and Frank came to visit.  The family liked him.

The wedding was very nice.  Alma happily spent the money to make it nice, and was short of cash afterwards.  Mama Margaret reported, 

I said then I was afraid we had been too lavish with Eva but she thought not.  She seemed to think there was nothing too good for our youngest.

Fortunately, Will came through with a check for Alma.

Frank and Eva seemed very happy at first…and then they weren’t.  Eva commented years later that Frank Evans was not generous the way Will was.  I think that was the only time I ever heard her mention Frank’s name.  More than that I don’t know, except that he was apparently not physically abusive.  It seems plausible to me that Frank might have gotten tired of perennial comparisons to Will.  Eva could be sort of clueless.

Other suggestions have been that Eva was not a good housekeeper, and that unlike Frank she didn’t want children.  But as far as I can tell, these are merely conjectures.

They separated, and found they got along better when they weren’t living together.

And then, in late 1912, Eva moved down to Philadelphia, having found a teaching job there.  What was cause and what was effect?  Did Eva look for a job outside of New York so that she could get away from Frank?  Or was it that she was looking for a job because Frank wasn’t generous, and the Philadelphia job was the best she could get?  I don’t know.

There’s a mention of Frank in an early 1913 letter as being still in the picture, and then we never hear anything about him again.  I’d guess the divorce was not bitter: just a matter of burying a marriage that was already dead.  But divorces were surely more complicated in 1913 than they are today.

Barbara found a little more about the rest of Frank’s life.  He married a woman named Dora in 1918, and they had two daughters: Nancy in 1919, named after Frank’s mother, and Carol in 1925.  They crossed the Atlantic several times, so maybe he had some singing engagements in Europe.

​Frank died on July 16, 1964, according to Barbara’s research.  So he lived on for half a century after he parted ways with Eva.  I hope he lived happily ever after.