Maude Ethel Branson

Maude Ethel Branson, eldest daughter and first child of Alvin Thorpe Branson and Mary Eliza Simmons, was born 24 February 1884 at Quartzburg, Mariposa County, CA, where her father was working as a miner. Maude grew up in Mariposa County in the communities of Quartzburg, El Portal, Mariposa, Hornitos, and at a cabin along the Merced River where the Exchequer Dam would eventually be built. She is known to have attended Quartzburg District School with many Branson and Simmons relatives of her generation, but at other times she went to class in Mariposa.

At age seventeen, it was her dream to obtain higher education, but her mother unexpectedly became pregnant a fifth time, and the anticipated cost of the baby laid claim to the funds her parents had intended to devote to Maude’s school expenses. She remained in Mariposa County, helped bring her little brother Ivan into the world on 9 November 1901, and then stayed home to attend to a considerable number of domestic duties because her mother had suffered health complications as a result of the birth that required an operation and a total of more than a year of recuperation. Much of this interval was spent in the town of Mariposa where the family regularly rented a house belonging to the Gann family.

Maude enjoyed courtship and romance. While she was still in Mariposa County, one of her suitors was Jay Cook Bruce. It is an irony Maude did not end up with him, because Jay went on to have a long-term marriage and a substantial brood of kids and lived a long life (some of it spent as a mountain lion hunter for the California Fish & Game Commission), a set of accomplishments Maude was unable to garner from any of the men whose rings she accepted in matrimony. Alas for Jay, when Maude finally was able to head off to the San Francisco Bay Area to go to nursing school, she went. She was apparently determined to see something of the world before she settled down. The latter motivation, in fact, seemed to mean more to her than the career prospects. Although she eventually supported herself as a psychiatric nurse, her focus once she obtained her degree does not seem to have been to pursue her profession, but to pursue men. Over the next thirty years, she would proceed through five marriages.

The first marriage, to Edward James of England, then a resident of San Francisco, was a brief one. The time the couple spent actually dwelling together may have been as short as six months. (The photo of him at right was probably taken during that time period.) The wedding, which took place in San Jose, CA 18 August 1905, appears to have been a somewhat rushed event at the home of a Mr. F.H. Eastey (the best man), 200 S. Seventh Street. The ceremony was witnessed by only a few friends of the couple and no family. Reverend Dr. Hudson presided. The bridesmaid was Allean Bond, one of Maude’s good friends from Mariposa County, Allean being the daughter of Coulterville jeweller John Bond. The whole business gives the impression of a shotgun wedding, but if so, either Maude had a miscarriage or she was mistaken about being pregnant. No child was born to the couple, and with that lack, the urge to stay together was apparently terminally weakened. Family notes say the divorce became final December, 1906. Strictly speaking, it was probably an annulment rather than a divorce per se. Surviving postcards sent by Allean Bond to Maude in February, 1907, when Maude was living in Merced, Merced County, CA, are addressed to her under her maiden name.

Though based in Merced in the winter of 1906/07, Maude surely visited her parents at the Gann house in Mariposa on a regular basis. This brought her into the sphere of a young man named John Davidson Curtis, who soon became her beau. John, a son of Thomas Westlake Curtis and Margaret F. Catherine Hall, had been born in Fannin County, GA. He had come west as a young man and had become a Mariposa County miner. Sometimes known as Jack Curtis, he would become Maude’s second husband and would be cherished by her both in person and in memory. It would be one of the tragedies of her life story that the couple’s marriage did not have the chance to thrive. John unfortunately had one flaw as a suitor. His health was compromised. Like many miners, he had caught tuberculosis. And so despite the pair’s affection for one another, the courtship proceeded slowly. In the late spring of 1907, Maude departed for Kennett, Shasta County, CA, at that time a copper-mining boomtown. (Years later Kennett would be inundated when Lake Shasta was created.) Maude appears to have gone to help her friend Allean Bond through a period of grief. Allean and her parents had moved to Kennett in early 1907. In early April, John Bond had caught a seemingly minor cold that unexpectedly turned into pneumonia. The infection had claimed his life. It is unknown whether Maude stayed right in the home of Allean and her widowed mother. She may have been quartered with her own aunt and uncle, Theresa Branson Moore and William Osborne Moore, who had also recently settled -- albeit temporarily -- in Kennett.

John Curtis, meanwhile, headed off to Pueblo, Pueblo County, CO to enter a sanitarium for treatment. An affectionate postcard, sent in the summer of 1907 from John in Pueblo to Maude in Kennett, survives within the genealogical collection of Ivan Branson. On that card, John mentioned having just left the hospital and that he was feeling good -- and in the hope of proving his point, included the photograph reproduced at left, taken four days after he was discharged. With a clean bill of health -- unfortunately an overly optimistic verdict -- John returned to California and in due course Maude agreed to marry him. Unfortunately, mining was what he knew, so he returned to that profession, making what must be viewed in hindsight as the worst decision possible. He became a coal miner. Deep rock gold-bearing quartz ore mining had its propensity to cause miner’s lung, but coal mining was notorious for doing so. Nevertheless John began working at the coal diggings at Stone Canyon in the Cholame Hills of southern Monterey County. The outpost was a rather remote place to have a wedding, so when it came time, the rites were held in Salinas in the northern and far more accessible part of the county. The event occurred 20 October 1908. Maude went to live with Jack in Stone Canyon. Eight months after the wedding, she gave birth to daughter Doris Margaret Curtis -- fated to be an only child.

It was not long before Jack came down once again with active symptoms of tuberculosis. However healthy he may have seemed in late 1908, he either had not been cured or had tempted fate too much and had come down with a fresh case. His condition deteriorated, and soon he was unable to work. An invalid, he sought the shelter of his birth family in Blue Ridge, GA. His parents were both deceased, but Jack was the baby of the family and had older siblings to turn to. His spinster sister Alice became his prime caregiver. Maude was also on hand off and on, but she split her time between Georgia and California. She may have been worried about exposing Doris to TB, so when she went on her sojourns, as a rule Doris was left in the care of Alvin and Mary Branson in Mariposa County. Maude herself is shown as a member of her parents’ household in the 1910 census. Maude was, however, at her husband’s side when he perished at the home of his brother James Y. Curtis near Blue Ridge. The death date cited by Maude in family history notes was 6 November 1912. The local paper, the Blue Ridge Summit states it was one day earlier. John was buried on the seventh at Harmony, GA.

(At right, Maude and daughter Doris in the late 1920s or early 1930s.)With her nursing training to call upon, Maude knew she could get by as a single woman if she had to, but she wanted a man in her life and preferred to be a housewife. Her next husband was Fred Leo Murray, whom she wed in May, 1914, probably in Stockton. The latter community was on the verge of becoming the new base of the Alvin Branson/Mary Simmons clan. Alvin and Mary themselves relocated from Mariposa County to Stockton in June, 1914. The mining economy had collapsed back in their old stomping grounds. Meanwhile they knew Ivan would have better educational opportunities in Stockton. Maude may have met Fred Murray in Stockton, but this is unclear. He is somewhat of a mystery figure. He can be tracked in public records during the few years he was married to Maude, but with a somewhat common name, it is impossible to be certain of his origins. It is vaguely possible he had some connection of Joseph Albert Murray, who spent the first few years of the 1900s working as a barber in Mariposa before moving on to southern Oregon. Joseph’s wife was Lura Allean Morse. A 1928 postcard from this “other Allean” survives in Maude’s papers. (Yes, incredibly, Maude had two friends named Allean.) This suggests a lasting bond with the Murray clan. However, a genealogy of the family to which Joseph Albert Murray belonged has not yet been discovered. At the moment, research would suggest Joseph did not have a relative named Fred Leo Murray. So where Fred came from is unknown. What is clear, though, is that Fred was not a man of means. In the 1916 voter register, in which he and Maude appear as residents of 728 Lindsay Street in Stockton, his occupation is “waiter.” On his draft card, filed 12 September 1918, his occupation is described as “unemployed clerk.”

One reason Fred was unemployed in September, 1918, was that he was dying. The address on the draft card is 420 E. Monterey Avenue. This was Maude’s parents’ address, and it is apparent from context that the couple had sought shelter with Alvin and Mary. Fred died 18 September 1918, only six days after the draft card was filed. The cause of death is not known, but tuberculosis again seems likely, as Fred was only thirty-seven years old when he perished. His draft card shows a birth date of 20 May 1881.

Maude married Stockton-resident Clyde Leroy Miller in 1919. He had been working as a miner in 1917 and 1918 and apparently had done so in tandem with Maude’s brother Jim. It is logical to conclude Jim must have introduced Clyde to Maude. A son of John Curtis Miller and Georgia Cummings, Clyde had been born 9 August 1882 (sources vary as to the year, but 1882 fits best and is what is reported in his California Death Index entry), probably in San Benito County, CA. As near as can be determined from public records, his mother died before he was grown and though he maintained contact with his father (who eventually moved to Morrison, Noble County, OK), his upbringing was completed in Pacific Grove, Monterey County, CA by his maternal grandmother Lucy A. Cummings and his music-teacher aunt Emma R. Lofland. In his late twenties Clyde began to roam California, from Santa Barbara to San Francisco. He was probably married to an unidentified woman in 1911 while he was in San Francisco (where he may have gone because his uncle Orlando Chester Miller lived there), because a postcard survives in Maude’s memorabilia sent to Clyde 5 May 1911 by a friend with the initials D.O. that appears to be congratulating him on becoming a married man. Details of this union are otherwise unknown, except that it must have been brief. Claude moved a bit eastward in approximately 1913, simultaneously giving up his usual occupation of teamster. He farmed briefly near Stockton before heading up to the Mother Lode to be a miner in such places as El Portal in Mariposa County and Newcastle in Placer County. During his marriage to Maude, he was a mechanic and a driver. The couple moved at least three times, but were always based somewhere in Stockton, residing first on E. Flora Street, then on E. Church Street, and then by 1924, they took possession of a home at 410 E. Monterey Avenue, next door to her parents and brother Walter at 420. Unfortunately the couple could not keep their union going and they separated in 1925. Their divorce was finalized a few years later. Clyde went on to become a miner in Yuba County before returning to Stockton or its vicinity, where he passed away 29 November 1941.

After Clyde’s departure, Maude kept the house at 410 E. Monterey. Doris remained with her, working as a stenographer until following boyfriend Richard Jay Fette to Chicago, where they were wed in the spring of 1931. (After a number of years in Chicago and Peoria, the couple returned to finish their lives in California.) Maude was on her own for only a few months before she became a wife for the fifth time. Her new husband was Roy Albert Chamberlin. Roy was another resident of Stockton. He had been born 4 June 1889 in Reedley, Fresno County, CA, and in his early adulthood had lived in Bakersfield, Kern County, CA, where he worked as a messenger for Wells Fargo while supporting his first wife and his mother. Maude and Roy were married 12 October 1931 in Carson City, NV. This marriage would also end in divorce. The decree was issued 30 September 1938, but the couple had separated 21 September 1935. Roy died 16 July 1966 in Sonora, Tuolumne County, CA.

Apparently five attempts at matrimony were enough. Maude remained content to be single. When her mother died in 1940, she moved in at 420 Monterey, joining her bachelor brother Walter, who had inherited the property. (Walter and Maude are shown at left in front of that home.) Inasmuch as Walter had no offspring, Maude would eventually inherit the house from him. At the very end of her life, Maude moved into a care facility. She died of cancer in Stockton 8 January 1972. The house at 420 Monterey was inherited by Doris, who sold it to her uncle Ivan in the 1970s.

A Note of Appreciation: The creation of this website might not have been possible without the initial genealogical efforts of Maude Branson Chamberlin. Maude was at the right place at the right time to keep up her connection to the greater Branson clan, and she did not ignore the opportunity. Many of the children and grandchildren of John and Martha Branson lived in San Joaquin County during the first half of the 20th Century, either in Stockton like Maude, or in and around Manteca, or at points inbetween. This group included Alvin Thorpe Branson, Nancy Anne Branson Harrington Napier, Thomas Henry Ousley Branson, and some or all of these three siblings’ offspring, as well as Theresa Branson and her foster son, Clarence Johnson, son of Mary Jane Branson Johnson. Maude also kept in regular touch with members of the lines of Phoebe (in Merced and Oakland), Joseph (in Mariposa and Fresno Counties), and John, Jr. (in Madera and Fresno). Judging by the correspondence, photos, memoirs, and genealogical lists that have survived in her brother Ivan’s collection, Maude took it upon herself to try to assemble a current and complete record of the Branson clan as of the late 1940s. By that time, Maude was reaching her mid-sixties, and her parents’ generation was dying off. The only two of her uncles and aunts who still survived were Mary Jane Branson Johnson, who died in 1949, and John Sevier Branson, Jr., who passed away in 1951. Had Maude been like her cousins and ignored the chance to ask relatives for their birthdates, marriage dates, etc. while the bonds of shared descent were still knotted, there would have been no convenient foundation for later research. As it was, she got a very good start and eventually passed along a thick cache of notes to Ivan as he began his family-history endeavors in the early 1950s. Maude continued to help her brother until her final months. Her contributions ultimately proved critical, because Ivan concentrated upon the male lineage -- those relatives with the surname Branson -- which meant that the lines of John and Martha’s daughters and granddaughters received short shrift from him. (The only two children of Ivan’s aunts to be mentioned by name in his book, Bones of the Bransons, are Eunice and Elsie Harrington, and only in the caption of a photograph, because the two girls, then in their childhood, had been standing next to Martha when a picture was taken of the elderly matriarch sitting in her rocking chair on the porch of the house at Grasshopper Ranch.) Because Maude’s work lay waiting among Ivan’s papers, enough names and dates and places surfaced to put together the structure of the whole clan in 2005 and then update it, resulting in this website and the larger, privately-kept archive. Well done, Maude.

Child of Maude Ethel Branson with John Davidson Curtis

Doris Margaret Curtis

For genealogical details, click on Doris’s name.

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