John Cornelius
Harrington
John Cornelius Harrington, eldest child and only son of
Nancy Anna Branson and her first husband Peter Harrington, was born 10 March 1878 in Merced, Merced
County, CA. Family notes suggest he was known as Jack, but all public records have him as John, so he
will be called John throughout this biography.
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, Theresa 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.
John’s first foray into the wide world was probably his military service. He served as a private in Company A of the Sixth California Infantry in the Spanish-American War of 1898. It is not known whether his service took him overseas, but it definitely took him beyond his hometown.
When he resumed his civilian life, John entered into (or perhaps returned to) a typical occupation for men of Merced of his generation. He took a job with Southern Pacific railroad. In the 1900 census he 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 street car conductor.
John remained in the East Bay for some years. There
he wed Ethel Elizabeth Wright, daughter of Ezekiel Wright and Nancy Jane Gibbs. She was a native of Oregon,
probably of Myrtle Creek, Douglas County, OR, where her father had been born and raised. Her father had died
in 1894 and even before that event, her parents’ marriage had ended and her mother had remarried a man with
the surname Duvall (or DeuVall). Her California Death Index entry even suggests Mr. Duvall was her
biological father. In 1895 her mother had wed Eberhard McGaston, only to divorce him in 1897. Ethel had
therefore grown up in unsettled circumstances, spending some of it in Grants Pass, Josephine County, OR,
where her mother had supported the household as a boarding-house cook. The latter detail means that
Ethel and John went through a similar sort of upbringing. The pair probably met after Ethel accompanied
her older siblings Jessie and Walter down to Oakland. Jessie is known to have gone through nurse training
at the then-new Alta-Bates Sanitarium; at some point Ethel herself completed nurse training. Ethel came to
the marriage extremely young. Her CDI entry states she was born in 15 June 1889, but most other sources
point to the birth having occurred 15 June 1890. Assuming the latter year is correct, she was not quite
fifteen when the wedding took place in May, 1905. (The Alameda County marriage license was taken
out 26 May 1905. Ethel claimed to be over eighteen.) It was apparently a case of two lovers launching into
a union in an impulsive manner, and the relationship would suffer from their mutual lack of maturity. (Though
it must be pointed out that the marriages of John’s sisters all lasted until death despite the tender
ages at which some of them became brides.)
John and Ethel’s one known child, Harold Carpenter Harrington, was born in early February, 1906. This was a son John would not get to raise, though there is evidence that some contact was preserved between father and son. John and Ethel split up for good barely three years into the marriage. She was granted a divorce 25 November 1908. According to a brief article in the Oakland Tribune, her basis was that John was too often drunk and that he had poured beer in Harold’s mouth. It was a time when divorces were granted only for compelling cause. Ethel would have had to make her case strongly and the detail of John pouring the beer in his kid’s mouth may have been exaggeration for procedural convenience. However, it is safe to say the spouses had ceased to get along, and the part about John drinking a lot was undoubtedly accurate. Ethel became a housekeeper in a boarding house, raising Harold on her own until she wed Charles E. Sturtevant in the 1910s. The couple relocated (with Harold) to Eugene, OR. In the late 1920s they moved to Los Angeles County. By then, Harold was grown. Ethel and Mr. Sturtevant parted ways in about 1930, after which she temporarily took refuge near (or with) her sister Jessie in Chico, Butte County, CA. By the mid-1930s she and Harold took to sharing quarters, at first in San Jose, then back to Los Angeles County, and finally in Alameda County, where she passed away 28 September 1948. She had no other children, perhaps because of an injury that resulted in the loss of a leg.
Whether John might have married again or had additional
offspring is unknown. Unfortunately John’s comings and goings after he and Ethel split up are hard to
determine. It is impossible to say if he may have had a liaison
of sufficient duration to generate more offspring. 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 1901
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. Arithmetic suggests John may have had three children total, but since Harold is the
only name that appears in any available source, he is therefore the only one listed below.
John may be the John G. Harrington enumerated in Oakland in the 1910 census as a single lodger. The stats from that document are however not a perfect match, above and beyond the wrong middle initial. The next chronological clue known to refer to the right John Harrington 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. There is no indication he was 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. However, relatively few of those male relatives possessed the prominent lips you can see in the photos on this page. All of the images shown here came from the collection of his sister Josephine with the exception of the childhood one at the bottom of the page, which came from the collection of his uncle Alvin Thorpe Branson as preserved by Alvin’s son Ivan. The picture in the upper left corner of this biography is of John standing on the front stoop of 1442 Morton Street in Alameda, a residence purchased by Josephine and Charles McDonald in the summer of 1919. John was already over forty in 1919, so the image is proof he kept his lean, youthful looks into the beginning of middle age.)
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. He is listed as Divorced, but whether this refers to the divorce from Ethel or a later spouse is unknown.
By the early 1930s John was in Yolo County, CA. (He can be reliably traced from this point on.) The 1932 voter register shows him in the small community of Clarksburg. Soon thereafter he found other quarters in the county seat, Woodland, where a number of his relatives had come to be based including (off and on) his sister (Irene) Annie Salmon and her grown-and-married children Wanda Patrie and Jack Salmon. Woodland was John’s final “independent-life” place of residence. He declined in health and by the end of the decade had to be institutionalized in Weimar Sanitarium in Placer County. The facility was devoted to tuberculosis cases. Whether John had TB himself is unknown. If not, he was probably suffering from some other severe and debilitating lung condition such as chronic emphysema.
In the late summer of 1940, John was transferred to the Veterans Home of California in Yountville, Napa County, CA. He passed away 12 October 1940 only a few weeks after he had been admitted.
Child of John Cornelius
Harrington with Ethel Elizabeth Wright
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