Alma Branson


Alma Branson, daughter of Thomas Henry Ousley Branson and Frances Bauer, was born 27 October 1883 on her parents’ rural property near Quartzburg, a mining outpost (a settlement often better known in the early 1880s as Washington Mine) a couple of miles north of Hornitos, Mariposa County, CA. This home was quite close to “Grasshopper Ranch,” the homestead of her grandparents John and Martha Branson. Alma was raised there until adolescence, at which point the land was sold to her uncle Joe Branson, as a consequence of which Alma and her parents and siblings came to live within the village of Hornitos itself. Their house was along Burns Creek in a part of Hornitos considered to be the “Chinese” section of the community -- a natural place to choose to live given that Thomas Branson had learned to speak Chinese while growing up in the Gold Rush mining camp of Phillips Flat. Alma enjoyed a stable and nurturant upbringing. Her father did not accumulate the sort of wealth that would leave a large endowment to his offspring, but he was a solid breadwinner, employed variously as a tinsmith, blacksmith, carpenter, miner, and Chinese-English interpreter for the Mariposa County court.

Alma wed at nineteen. This was a modest, sensible age by the standards of her era and it was two to three years older than most of her female cousins. Nevertheless, it was very much on the early side when compared to her siblings. Her three brothers never married at all, nor did her sister Inez, and her sister Evalena waited until she was in her thirties. In another respect, the event fit right in -- it took place six months after the wedding of her sister Alice to John Williams, and two months before the wedding of her sister Mabel to Frank Culbertson. Alma’s bridegroom was Frederick William Reeb, a native of Hornitos born 22 August 1880, son of George Reeb and Rosina Hunziker. Fred was someone she had known lifelong -- as a schoolmate, as a neighbor, as “part of the same crowd.” The Reebs had long been closely associated with the Bransons and Bauers. Various members of these three pioneer families had spent decades sharing the same small community, working together as miners and acting as business partners in non-mining ventures. George was one of the prominent citizens of Hornitos, a major landowner and a butcher famed for his sausages, which he shipped throughout the local region as well as selling over the counter at his local shop, the Hornitos Market. He had on many occasions purchased beef cattle for slaughter from John and from his son Joe, and even from Alma’s father Thomas when Thomas did some stock-raising. During the interval that Alma and Fred were courting, Alma’s brother Hugh was a driver of George Reeb’s butcher wagon. The pair were united 4 December 1902 in Merced. They honeymooned in San Francisco and as soon as that was done, began their home life as a Hornitos couple.

In 1909, Fred and Alma’s union would be echoed by the marriage of Fred’s brother George Manuel Reeb to Alma’s first cousin Elizabeth Ann Bauer, daughter of Michael Bauer and Mary Jane Geary (Mary Jane in turn was a sister of Ella Geary, the wife of Joe Branson.) Meanwhile, the birth of Fred and Alma’s child Lila Frances Reeb 7 June 1905 forged a blood bond between people who had already been treating each other as family.

A bit of genealogical trivia: Fred Reeb’s sister Katherine, who became Mrs. John B. Morrison, was the grandmother of Jeanette Morrison, better known as film star Janet Leigh, who was in turn mother of Jamie Lee Curtis. These two actresses may have inherited their good looks from Rosina Hunziker Reeb. A surviving tintype photograph of Rosina from the 1860s or 1870s shows her to have been a beauty.

Unfortunately, Alma and Fred had very little time to enjoy their well-wrought union. Fred died 8 December 1907 at only twenty-seven years old. The cause was typhoid fever. (Shown at right is the inscription of the headstone of his grave in Hornitos Cemetery.) Alma found herself confronted by single motherhood. The usual way a woman of her era dealt with that situation was immediate remarriage. Alma however had grown up in a family where she never had to question that she was “good enough to do anything.” She came up with a more ambitious approach to the dilemma of how to support herself and her young daughter: She set out to become a nurse. This bold sort of response to a crisis was a display of her essential character. Alma wasn’t afraid to Be Somebody.

In order to free herself up enough to accomplish her career goal, Alma left Lila in the care of her parents. Alma meanwhile was based in Merced, Merced County, CA, which though it was the nearest large town to Hornitos, was a good fifteen miles away. Getting back and forth was not a routine matter. The Yosemite Valley Railroad was now beginning to provide service from Merced into Mariposa County, but it did not have a depot at Hornitos. The commute was even more of a logistical challenge when her parents were based at their alternate home at Mount Bullion mining outpost. Alma had no choice but to stay most nights in Merced, and go without seeing her daughter for many days at a stretch. The emotional sacrifice undoubtedly helped motivate Alma to do well, and make her parents and daughter proud of her. She succeeded. By no later than the summer of 1909, Alma was employed at Merced Sanitarium.

In terms of employment prospects, getting on-staff at the sanitarium was a feather-in-the-cap. If Alma had been a typical nurse of 1909, she might have been hired by a private family to tend to the needs of an invalid elder citizen. Her role might well have been a matter of administering doses of medicine, changing bedpans, giving sponge baths, and spoon-feeding, i.e. the sort of thing that in the Twenty-First Century would be relegated to a home healthcare aide. Alma was instead employed at a cutting-edge medical facility. The sanitarium had been founded early in the Twentieth Century by Walter Eastman Lilley, who had come west from New York state in 1900 to replace his brother Frederick Lilley, a Merced-based physician who had died after he had contracted a fatal infection in an operating-room procedure in the autumn of 1899. Walter, having learned the latest surgical techniques at Baltimore Medical College, set up his own Merced office with the newest and best equipment he could acquire. By 1905, he even had an x-ray machine in place. Among his strokes of genius was the establishment of the sanitarium, which allowed patients to stay in the same building where he worked, removing the need for house calls and allowing his patients to be within close proximity to his full array of equipment, staff, and operating room. Early Twentieth Century hospitals all too often were viewed with suspicion by the general public. Many people would go to them only as a last resort. But what Walter came up with was seen as chic, upscale, and progressive.

In 1909 or so when Alma joined the staff, Walter Lilley was still serving as the main doctor at the sanitarium. The facility was however not administered by him. In fact, he may have sold out his interest quite early, shortly after it was set up, and had gone on to be paid for his hours like other employees. Instead, the facility was operated by a series of resident proprietors. In 1909, and continuing for several more years, the proprietor was Pearl Holland Battey, a young divorcée from Massachusetts. Alma was one of two staff nurses. They were assisted by two women who dealt with the non-medical aspects of in-patient care: the cooking, cleaning, and laundry. It was an all-female staff. All young unmarried women. Alma and Pearl were the eldest -- both age twenty-five in 1909. This is to say, Alma’s real boss was not Walter Lilley, but another woman. Alma was in a setting where she could demonstrate her worth without being overshadowed by male superiors who might dismiss or downplay her contribution.

Alma herself may not have been a native of Merced, but she must have felt at home. Merced Sanitarium was by then at 356 21st Street. Earlier the facility had been housed four blocks away within the Barcroft Building, a large brick structure named for Raphael Barcroft, one of Merced’s leading citizens, and a man who had been Thomas Branson’s business partner in the mid-1880s, when they operated Branson & Barcroft, a tinsmith-and-hardware firm. That business had existed for nearly a decade before that with Raphael’s brother Fred as Thomas Branson’s partner. Alma’s beloved uncle William McDonald lived nearby, as did Alma’s cousins John S. McDonald and Teresa McDonald Garibaldi and their respective households. In the years before Alma’s arrival, the neighborhood had also been home to Alma’s aunts Nan Napier, Mary Johnson, and Theresa Moore. Many of Alma’s first cousins on her father’s side -- though with the last names of McDonald, Harrington, and Johnson rather than Branson -- had spent most or all of their childhoods within a few blocks of where she was now living and working.

Among those who Alma cared for during her time on staff at the sanitarium was her own mother, whose health was growing increasingly troublesome as the 1910s went on, and who found it necessary to check into the sanitarium for an interval in early July, 1913.

Due to her job, her place of residence, and her family connections, Alma became a very well-known and popular figure in Merced society. She was certain to have been the target of any number of matchmaking attempts. She did not let herself be rushed. She had been a widow for nearly six years before she accepted the overtures of a local baker, Herbert Kibby Youd. Herbert was one of the five children of George Youd and Hattie (Harriet) Kibby. Herbert’s parents were pioneers of Merced County. Born 31 January 1887, Herbert had grown up upon -- and had undoubtedly been born upon -- the family farm near Snelling, a community near the foothills and only a few miles from Hornitos. By the time he and Alma met, the household had recently been reestablished within the town of Merced in a house quite close to the sanitarium. Alma and Herbert became husband and wife Monday afternoon, 6 October 1913, Presbyterian clergyman J.W. Lundy presiding. While this date is certain, the place cannot be pinned down quite as definitively. The marriage certificate indicates Alma and Herbert were wed in Stockton, San Joaquin County, CA. However, the article about the wedding published in the Merced Express says the event took place in Manteca, San Joaquin County, CA -- the place Alma’s parents were then living. Yet a reference in the Mariposa Gazette names Antioch, Contra Costa County, CA as the venue. It is quite likely all three sources are accurate. The bureaucratic aspects were definitely accomplished in Stockton, but this could easily have been dealt with before noon, leaving plenty of time for a ceremony in front of family and friends in Manteca, and later there might have been a reception at the home of Alma’s sister Evalena Diffin in Antioch. Thankfully all sources agree that Merced was where Alma and Herbert made their new home upon returning from a honeymoon in San Francisco.

Herbert and Alma spent approximately five more years in Merced. Herbert, the co-proprietor of the Merced Bakery at the time of the wedding, took a job with Farmers & Merchants Bank. If she had not already done so before the wedding, Alma took Lila back full-time -- she would have had to in any case, given her mother’s decline in health. (Frances would succumb altogether in late 1916.) Herbert may have adopted his stepdaughter. Lila is shown in a couple of public records with the surname Youd during her teen years. After turning eighteen, though, she resumed using the Reeb surname.

(A bit more about Alma’s associates at Merced Sanitarium: In 1919, Pearl Battey married Thomas Chalmers Law, Jr., son of a Merced attorney. Once her last name was no longer Battey, Pearl went back to using her “regular” first name, which was Betty. It is understandable she had not wanted to be called “Betty Battey.” Also in 1919, Walter Lilley’s son Ivan Walter Lilley married Inez Harriet Youd, a younger sister of Herbert Kibby Youd.)

In about 1918, the household was reestablished in Richmond, Contra Costa County, CA. Herbert began working for Standard Oil at the refinery in Richmond. He had a variety of jobs there, including filter charger, before working his way up to foreman. Alma found a position as a nurse for Cottage Hospital -- it may even have been her job situation, rather than his, that prompted the relocation. It certainly loomed large in determining where their home address would be. For the next twenty-five years Alma and Herbert would live in close proximity to Cottage Hospital. The hospital was located at 906 Barrett Avenue. The Youds started out at 450 Ninth Street. They moved in 1920 or 1921 to 452 Ninth. (Living across the street was Herbert’s brother George William Youd and his wife Pansy at 451 Ninth.) These Ninth Street dwellings were only a one-minute walk to the north of the hospital. In 1922 or 1923, Alma and Herbert moved to 920 Barrett, then in about 1928, went to 903 Barrett, i.e. they came to be about as close to Alma’s workplace as they could get without actually living within its walls.

Shown here in the foreground is Richmond’s Cottage Hospital. Today the parcel is the site of a Kaiser Permanente medical facility. This view dates from the 1920s when Alma was working there. The house across the street in the background might well be 903 Barrett, home to Alma and Herbert for about fifteen years.

Lila was less than halfway through her teens at the time of the move to the Bay Area, so naturally she moved as well and proceeded to come of age as a Richmond gal. She then continued to live with Alma and Herbert for most of her twenties and halfway through her thirties, right up until she married Fred Reinertson in 1940 and left to found a new home with him. Until that development, Lila had only lived away from home twice. The first instance was when she partook of some sort of student housing in the first year or two of her time at the University of California at Berkeley. The second was right after her 1927 graduation when she departed to spend three years teaching school in Loyalton, Sierra County, CA. When she came back to Richmond, she obtained a job as a teacher, and later as a counsellor, with Richmond Union High School, the same high school she had attended as a student. Inasmuch as that job was local and her old room was waiting for her, it made sense to “come back home to Mom.”

Lila was not Alma and Herbert’s only housemate. In the early 1920s, perhaps even as early as the year 1920 itself, Alma’s spinster sister Inez Branson moved in. Inez had spent a dozen years teaching at various schools across central California from Mariposa County to Calaveras County to Vallejo. It was surely no accident that she ended up taking a position with Peres Elementary School in Richmond. Despite a six-year difference in age, Alma and Inez were the two youngest girls of their family and their connection was deep. They enjoyed sharing a home to such a degree they never would live apart again for as long as both were alive.

Lila and Inez were not the only relatives who had come to Richmond with, or near the same time as, Alma and Herbert. Alma’s uncle and aunt Michael and Mary Jane Bauer had come as well, and in fact resided only three blocks away at 1208 Barrett. Other locals were some of Michael and Mary Jane’s children and children-in-law, including Elizabeth and George Reeb. And as mentioned, Herbert’s brother George Youd was there for a while as well, though only until his marriage to Pansy dissolved in the 1920s. Both Georges worked at the refinery with Herbert. To the members of these households, Richmond was the “new Hornitos.”

Alma kept working as a nurse until she was about sixty. Herbert retired in his mid-sixties, i.e. in the early 1950s. Indications are the couple’s circumstances remained stable and relatively uneventful through this interval, with one possible exception. The 1944 voter register shows Alma and Herbert no longer at 903 Barrett, where they and Inez had been registered in 1942. Herbert is shown on his own apart from the two women in a separate precinct. Alma and Inez appear at 600 Thirtieth Street, a newly acquired Richmond home that would remain in the family for decades. Perhaps this is an indication of some sort of marital discord. If so, the couple succeeded in getting past it and Herbert also came to live at 600 Thirtieth. The move took them only nine-tenths of a mile due east of their former home, essentially keeping them in the same neighborhood.

Alma did not get to enjoy her retirement phase long. In the early 1950s, as she was reaching seventy years old, she developed amytrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. She suffered from increasing debilitation for five years, and then succumbed to the disease 2 September 1958 in Richmond. Her remains were interred at Sunset View Cemetery in El Cerrito. This established a family plot of four sequential graves. Ultimately Herbert, Lila, and son-in-law Fred Reinertson would be laid to rest in the others.

Herbert Youd stayed in the house at 600 Thirtieth for the rest of his days. At first he had the company of Inez and then the company of Lila after Lila was widowed, but he survived them, too. He also outlived his brother George and even Mary Jane Geary Bauer, though that venerable daughter of Gold Rush pioneers at one point appeared destined for immortality and ultimately surpassed one hundred years of age. Eventually he was bereft of all or nearly all of the kinfolk who had come to the East Bay with him. Lonely, age ninety and possibly suffering from a terminal illness, Herbert committed suicide by hanging himself in his garage. His date of death was 11 February 1977.


Alma and the other surviving children of Thomas and Frances Branson, a photo taken outside the home of Alice on a farm near Manteca, CA in 1943. From left to right, Mabel, Alice, Inez, Alma, Evalena, and Hugh.


Child of Alma Branson with Frederick William Reeb

Lila Frances Reeb

For genealogical details, click on Lila’s name.


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