John Joseph Branson

John Joseph Branson, eldest son and first child of Joseph Branson and Ellen Margaret “Ella” Geary, was born 12 September 1880 on his parents’ ranch north of Hornitos, Mariposa County, CA, near the mining outpost of Quartzburg. He spent the whole of his childhood at that locale, and attended the Quartzburg District School in a class composed largely of relatives and children of his parents’ in-laws.

All of the children of Joe and Ella turned out tall and robust. The four boys were uniformly handsome and manly in their young adulthood. A tendency toward a receding hairline was part of this heritage as well, and John exhibited this trait early on.

Because of his background, John naturally became a miner when he grew up, and continued in that occupation through his twenties. Alas, it was his misfortune to have come of age at a point when the economy of his native region was collapsing. His father had done well enough as a mine owner and cattle rancher to have ensured a comfortable retirement, but John was unable to “get set up,” as the saying goes. Therefore as he was reaching thirty he headed off to Santa Barbara County, where various neighbors and distant relatives had gone over the previous several decades. He became employed in the California oil-drilling industry, which was entering its boom period. He would not be an oil worker long, but the change of venue was the beginning of a long association with the counties of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.

It must have been during his oil-worker days that John met Pearl M. Drumm, the woman who would become his first wife. Born July 1887, Pearl was a daughter of James Howard Drumm and Mary Cordelia Stubblefield. She had been raised in Santa Barbara County. At the time she and John met, she was unhappily married to Burnett Knotts. She divorced Mr. Knotts, citing cruelty (in those days, divorces had to have strong reasons for being granted, so it is uncertain how literally the term cruelty applied to the relationship). In late February, 1913, as soon as the divorce was out of the way, John and Pearl became man and wife. The license was issued on 19 February 1913 in Reno, Washoe County, NV. Presumably this was where the couple had the wedding, possibly on that date, perhaps slightly later.

John and Pearl seem to have spent the main part of their brief union residing in Hornitos. Both John and Pearl registered to vote in Hornitos for the elections of 1914 and 1916, John describing himself as a farmer in 1914, a miner in 1916. Hornitos is therefore the likely birthplace of their only child, Jean Clare Branson, born 9 April 1915. The picture is not entirely clear, however, because John and Pearl did not remain married long, and in subsequent years, John did not speak much of his time with her, leaving few within-the-family references to call upon. Most facts about Pearl, aside from her name, have had to be derived from public records, and these provide a highly fragmentary view. Among the uncertainties is the precise timing of the divorce. A possible clue is a bill of sale on file at the Mariposa County Courthouse, dated 30 April 1917. The sale involved a transfer of ownership of property from John J. Branson to “Mrs. Pearl M. Branson” and might well have represented a division of assets as part of the split-up. John’s World War I draft registration card, dated 19 September 1918, lists his closest relative as Pearl, and both are shown as living in Orcutt, Santa Barbara County, CA. Alas, the precise addresses are not provided on the card, which would have confirmed whether or not the pair were still in the same house. In the 1920 census, John is shown living alone, but he is still categorized as Married. Where Pearl and Jean were in 1920 is not known. A description of Jean’s later life can be read by clicking the link at the bottom of this page, but what Pearl did or where she went after 1918 is a mystery.

John lingered in Orcutt, but his occupation was less stable. The draft card describes him as a dealer in stock cattle and a farmer. The census two years later has him as a day laborer. Part of his difficulty selecting occupations may have been that he had no right arm below the elbow -- at least, this was the medical condition mentioned on the draft card that made him ineligible for active combat duty. The missing limb is not mentioned in any family account. Perhaps it was a condition “invented” for purposes of avoiding military service, but this seems unlikely. His handwriting on surviving documents definitely has the look of a right-handed man writing with his left hand. Perhaps he had suffered a bad accident during his oil-worker days.

As the 1920s progressed, John’s employment situation was not any more stable than it had been before. He is listed variously as merchant, laborer, oil worker, retired, or as a hotel proprietor (briefly, in 1930) in censuses and voter registers from 1918 to 1930. His domestic life, however, fell into better order. He managed to stay rooted in one place, and he got married again. His new wife was Marie Thurlwell, to whom he was wed 2 August 1924. Marie, who had been born 16 April 1887 in Lancaster County, NE on a farm just northwest of the city of Lincoln, was the daughter of John Henry Thurlwell (originally of Illinois, of English parentage) and Gertrude Beeson (originally from Indiana). In the early 1910s the Thurlwells -- John and Gertrude, their grown daughter Marie, and son Vernon, leaving another grown daughter, Hazel, back in Lincoln -- had moved out to San Luis Obispo County, where they had shortly afterward purchased a farm in Los Berros Valley. (This area, in the southern part of the county, happened to be where Pearl Drumm had lived while married to Burnett Knotts, and it was where Knotts was still residing with his subsequent wife.) It is not known precisely how John and Marie met, but probably she obtained some sort of job in Orcutt/Santa Maria, which from her parents’ farm was the closest spot where a non-agricultural job might readily be obtained. However they came to know one another, John’s relationship with Marie was ultimately as lasting as the one with Pearl had been fleeting. The marriages did share one characteristic -- they each resulted in the birth of precisely one child, each time a daughter. The new baby was Gertrude Ellen Branson, named for her two grandmothers. Gertrude, called Trudie, was born in Santa Barbara County in late 1926, probably in Orcutt. (Her obituary states Santa Maria, but this may have been an imprecise reference.) Inasmuch as her mother turned forty within months of her birth, it is not surprising she had no younger siblings.

John and Marie were reaching ten years of marriage, all of it spent in Orcutt, when a sea change occurred in the family dynamic. John’s father grew ill in 1934 and passed away during the summer. Judging by the voter registers of the next dozen years, John went back to the ranch where he had been born and raised and took care of his mother, who otherwise would have persisted in isolation in a house out of sight of any neighbor. He did not have to deal with the ranch itself because it continued to be rented to Horace Meyer, who ran cattle on the land, pasture being about the only thing the acreage was good for at that point. John got by doing whatever jobs he could grab. Most of the voter registers describe him as simply a laborer, though by 1944, he was serving as a constable.

It is an open question whether John stayed in Hornitos full-time during the twelve years. Certainly his mother needed companionship, but so did Marie and Gertrude, who apparently did not come with John. Again, the voter registers paint the picture, showing Marie registered in Los Berros Valley in the mid-1930s -- a strong indication she had gone back home to her parents -- and then in Arroyo Grande on the coast, in the Pismo Beach area. It may be that John simply registered in Hornitos in 1934 because he was spending an unusual amount of time there right after his father’s death, and then simply did not both to re-register elsewhere for many years. Perhaps Ella Geary Branson was only at the ranch part-time, and joined John, Marie, and Gertrude in their home the rest of the time. However, the fact is that family records are too incomplete to be certain John and Marie did not go through an estrangement and separation. If so, the experience did not permanently destroy the marriage. Subsequent public records imply the couple lived together from at least the late 1940s through Marie’s death approximately ten years later, and neither spouse’s obituary mentions an interruption in the marriage, nor an on-going rift. Nor did John’s time at the ranch ruin his bond with his daughter Trudie.

One thing family sources agree on is what John did with himself immediately after his mother’s death. He had long wanted to mine for gold on the family property, but his mother had refused to allow it. Ella had never completely recovered from the death of her son Alvin in a mining accident in his young adulthood, and was determined not to lose another child in a similar fashion. After the property’s two main mines had been shut down in approximately 1910, Ella had blocked any attempts to re-open them. This had frustrated John, who had always believed that there was still a worthwhile amount of ore hidden in the soil of the 1300-acre parcel. Now, at last, he was free to look. He did so for two or three years, or perhaps a bit more, only to discover nothing worth the trouble of digging up. Disgusted, he sold his twenty-percent share of the ranch to Horace Meyer. (Meyer would later acquire Ernest Branson’s share and half of Eldridge’s, making him a fifty percent owner of the property, with Grace and the heirs of Marguerite retaining the other half-interest.) He joined (assuming he had ever really been apart from) Marie in Arroyo Grande.

By the time John walked away from Hornitos for good, he was a grandfather twice over, Jean having given birth to the second of her two children in the mid-1940s. At approximately seventy years old, he was well past the typical age of retirement. Yet he had accumulated so little wealth over the course of his working life that even the funds garnered by the sale of his share of the ranch was too little to depend on. Needing to put in a minimum number of calendar quarters as a wage-earning employee in order to qualify for Social Security, a program he would not have contributed to as a self-employed miner or rancher, he spent three years or so in the civil service, working at Camp San Luis Obispo. During or at the conclusion of this period, he and Marie settled into a home at 1140 S. Thirteenth Street in Grover Beach, CA, a prime spot only half a mile from the shore along Pismo Beach. This would be the couple’s home for the remainder of their lives.

Trudie’s marriage to James Miller had ended early, but in about 1954 she married Bernard “Gabe” Gabriel and settled in Arroyo Grande. This community is contiguous with Grover Beach and so John and Marie were close at hand to welcome the arrivals of their grandchildren. Marie was able to greet the first three of Trudie and Gabe’s brood before she was stricken by ovarian cancer. She died of complications of the disease at San Luis Obispo General Hospital 16 December 1958. Her remains were interred at Arroyo Grande Cemetery three days later.

Throughout his interval as a widower John’s contribution as a grandpa was significant. Not only did Trudie have her hands full simply keeping up with her little ones -- her fourth arriving before the end of 1959, before the eldest had celebrated her fifth birthday -- but Gabe had a drinking problem, and the marriage had its ups and downs. After the birth of a fifth and final child in the early 1960s, Trudie sought a divorce, which was achieved by 1965. Unfortunately John could not be around to see how things played out much beyond that. Suffering from blocked coronary arteries, he was admitted to Arroyo Grande Community Hospital, where he perished there of a heart attack 7 October 1966. His remains were buried at Arroyo Grande Cemetery on the tenth.

Child of John Joseph Branson with Pearl M. Drumm

Jean Clare Branson

Child with Marie Thurlwell

Gertrude Ellen Branson

For genealogical details, click on each of the names.

To go back one generation, click here. To return to the Branson/Ousley Family main page, click here.