John Cornelius Harrington, eldest child and only son of
Nancy Anne Branson and her first husband Peter Harrington, was born 10 March 1878 in Merced, Merced
County, CA. He was familiarly known as Jack, but all public records have him as John.John Cornelius
Harrington
John Cornelius Harrington, eldest child and only son of
Nancy Anne Branson and her first husband Peter Harrington, was born 10 March 1878 in Merced, Merced
County, CA. He was familiarly known as Jack, but all public records have him as John.
John grew up entirely in Merced, where his father was a retail liquor dealer. His father died at the beginning of 1890. His mother remained in place, opening a boarding house in order to support herself along with John and his five younger sisters, Josephine, Elsie, Eunice, Irene, and Nina. Therefore John’s teen years were not spent in a traditional nuclear-family arrangement. The boarding house was likewise the home and partial means of support for his aunt Mary Jane Branson Johnson, who was also a single mother. Mary Jane’s son George and daughter Bretelle lived in the boarding house, as did she, while her eldest son Clarence Johnson lived nearby as the ward of a third Branson sister, Thesesa Moore. Mary Jane did the laundry in the evenings after her full-time job in a drygoods store. Nancy remained on site, performing the cooking and housekeeping duties. The premises overflowed with occupants between all the family members and a full slate of lodgers. As the senior child of the whole group, John probably was responsible for duties of many kinds. It was not until he was at the end of his teens that his mother married again and John’s stepfather John James “Babe” Napier joined the household.
When John came of age, like many Merced men of that era, he took a job with Southern Pacific railroad. In the 1900 census, John is shown in a barracks of railway workers in the delta region of Contra Costa County, CA. His occupation is listed as Timekeeper. One of his housemates at that time was Charles S. McDonald, the husband of his sister Josephine -- a man who was almost certain to have been his supervisor as well. John probably remained a railroad man for at least several more years. His job was probably why he went to Siskiyou County, where he appears in the 1900 voter register, and may have been why he subsequently settled in Oakland, Alameda County, CA, where he appears in the 1904 and 1906 voter registers. The latter source shows his occupation as conductor.
Presumably John remained in the East Bay continuously for
some years. Unfortunately public documents
do not make this a certainty, and within-the-family references reveal next to nothing about his adult
life. He is thought to have had a wife, but not for long, and perhaps only for a very short interval.
A note in Ivan Branson’s
collection of Branson genealogy indicates that John had a son, Harold -- though Harold’s name is
followed by a question mark. It is possible John was a husband long enough to sire two or even three
children. His mother’s 1939 obituary states that upon her dying, she left fourteen grandchildren. John’s
sisters had a total of twelve offspring, and that includes
Ruth McDonald, the daughter of Josephine Harrington and Charles S. McDonald, who died as a toddler in 1902
and so technically should not have been counted as being “left”
at the time of Nancy’s demise. The obituary does not reveal the names of the fourteen, hence it sheds no
light on what names go with any offspring of John. Since Harold is the
only name that appears in any available source, he is therefore the only one listed below. As you can
read on his biography page, Harold may be the Harold C. Harrington who was born in 1903. All of these
hints put together paint a picture of John being a family man in Oakland for most of the first decade of
the 20th Century. Chances are good this arrangement had ended by 1910, though, which may be the prime
reason John seems impossible to find in the 1910 census.
The next chronological clue about John is his World War I draft registration card, which he filed 12 September 1918. He is listed as a shipbuilder in Oakland. At this point in time many men, including several members of the Branson clan, such as John’s nephew Robert Seafield McDonald, were involved in the construction of ships in Alameda and Oakland for the war effort. John’s residence on the card is 840 Adeline in Oakland. He was apparently not married at that point, because the “Nearest Relative” section contains his mother’s name and address. Married men typically put their wives’ names and addresses there.
The card describes him as a tall and slender man with grey eyes and brown hair. This is a classic description of men of the Branson clan. In the photo above right, John is in his late twenties or early thirties. In the photo at upper left, he is at least in his early forties. The setting is the front stoop of 1442 Morton Street in Alameda, a residence purchased by Josephine and Charles McDonald in the summer of 1919. Below is one of the few other surviving photos of John, also taken in the same general time period. The photo was found in 2008 in an album of personal photos assembled by his nephew Robert Seafield McDonald, and filled with images from 1916 to 1918. This particular photo is one of the few in that album that had no date or identification, and so John has been identified from facial resemblance and the fact that the background looks precisely like Oakland or Alameda in 1918.
The 1926 voter register shows John as a laborer in Manteca, San Joaquin County, CA, in the same precinct that had long been home to his sisters Eunice, Elsie, and Irene, and to first cousins Clarence Johnson, Hugh McErlane Branson, and Alice Branson Williams. His mother and stepfather were also nearby. John may have been taken temporarily by one or more of these relatives. Otherwise his doings through the 1920s remain a blank. The 1930 census contains an entry for a John C. Harrington who was then living as a migrant farm worker in a laborer barracks in Verona, Sutter County, CA. This is very likely to be “the” John C. Harrington. The stats are right, and all references from 1930 to 1940 put John in the lower Sacramento Valley or the hills to either side. This 1930 census record is particularly intriguing because the marital status column contains a “D” for Divorced, the strongest direct documentation that John was at one point married.
By 1930, John was clearly immersed in a transient lifestyle. The 1932 voter register shows him in Clarksburg, Yolo County, CA as a farmer. The 1936 register has him in Woodland, Yolo County, CA as a laborer. His step-father Babe Napier’s obituary also places him as a resident of Woodland in 1936. His mother’s obituary places him in Weimar, Placer County, CA in 1939. When he passed away in the autumn of the following year, he was in Napa County, CA. His date of death was 12 October 1940.
Child of John Cornelius
Harrington
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