Mya Durso (full given name Myriam) was the adopted daughter of John Lazare Jeannopoulos and Ines (Agnes) Valda — a fact confirmed by her sister Aline in May 2026. An earlier draft of this record treated her as the Tunis-born biological baby on the 1951 SS Constitution manifest; that baby is actually her sister Claudine (Eftichia). Mya joined the family separately by adoption.
Per her 2002 Staten Island Advance obituary, she was born around 1950, moved with the family at age seven, and grew up in Manhattan — attending Mother Cabrini High School (Catholic girls’ school in Washington Heights) and the Katherine Gibbs School (the famed secretarial school) — before settling on Staten Island as an adult. She married Dominick Durso and they had two children: a son Anthony Durso and a daughter Aline Durso (named after her sister Aline Pepe).
She lived in Prince’s Bay on Staten Island’s South Shore, was a parishioner of St. Thomas R.C. Church, Pleasant Plains, and served as PTA president at PS 42 Eltingville, Totten Intermediate, and Tottenville High School — the public schools her own children attended. She worked for eight years as a receptionist at Kvaerner in Bridgewater NJ. Her hobbies were classical piano and the accordion.
She died at home on March 29, 2002, age 51, of complications of breast cancer. Funeral Mass at St. Clare’s Church; burial at Resurrection Cemetery, Pleasant Plains. Survived by Dominick, Anthony, Aline Durso, her parents John and “Agnes” Jeannopoulos, and her sisters Claudine Boyhan and Aline Pepe.
