William McDonald

William McDonald, second son and third child of Phoebe Ann Branson and William McDonald, was born 4 February, 1878 in Merced, Merced County, CA. He is not to be confused with his father of the same name. He also had a first cousin named William McDonald, son of his uncle Robert Seafield McDonald, though the latter is easy to distinguish because he was born in New York.

William’s mother died when he was nine years old. It is thought his mother’s sister Theresa Branson cared for the four McDonald children for a period of time, before the job was assumed by stepmother Agnes Dunn, whom William, Sr. married in 1892. In 1880 the household included Mary Jane Geary, Phoebe’s eighteen-year-old sister-in-law, as a servant (this information derived from the census). The youngest child of the family, Teresa, was then an infant. It could be that Phoebe required help caring for the children as early as this point.

Old family notes say little about William. He name appears on a list of the four children of Phoebe and William, and he is identified on the photograph reproduced below. Other than that, there is only one reference, saying he died in young adulthood, followed by a conspicuous blank where the names of any children would appear. That, along with what could be gleaned from the 1880 census, was all that was known about him. At the time this website was first activated, it seemed safe to assume William had died before 1900. This in turn made it highly unlikely that he ever had a wife or offspring. One reason for this assumption is that he does not appear in the 1900 census in Merced, even though nearly all of his immediate family were still in place. However, in 2007 photos of the gravemarkers of the McDonald plot at the Knights of Pythias Cemetery (now part of the Merced Cemetery District) were uploaded to FindaGrave.com by a helpful volunteer, and there in the midst of the graves of his close family -- his father, mother, stepmother, siblings John and Nancy, half-brother Ellsworth McDonald, and brother-in-law Roy Ames Price -- is William’s resting place. The headstone provides his precise birthdate and death date, showing that he did not die in his late teens or very early twenties as supposed, but survived to almost thirty, dying 10 June 1907.

Having the precise death date makes it possible to sort him out from the plethora of other William McDonalds who appear in the California Death Index. That source shows that he died in Fresno County. While he does not seem to appear in other Fresno County records -- for example the 1900 census or early 20th Century voter registers -- it is logical to assume he went there as a young man. If family notes are to be believed, he remained a bachelor, but this needs confirmation.

William may have been estranged from his family, accounting for his early departure from the bevy of his birth home. Tellingly, he is not mentioned in his grandfather John Sevier Branson’s will, written some time before John’s death in early 1905. The will specified that all the surviving children of Phoebe were to receive an equal portion of what would have been Phoebe’s share of the estate had she not already passed away. All three of William’s siblings are mentioned, but he is not. Perhaps he was considered a black sheep, or had otherwise been disowned. (Though not so severely that his remains were placed somewhere other than the family plot.)

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