San Francisco Beginnings

Following my mother’s maternal side of the family our story begins to grow dim with my great-grandparents, the Irish girl Margaret Conner and the Scotsman William Featherstone Douglass.

I conjecture about Margaret’s birth and early life from information concerning her brother Patrick taken from the article, “General Conner, The Founder of Camp Douglas,” in Tullidge’s Quarterly Magazine, No. II, Jan. 1881, Vol. I: “General Patrick Edward Connor was born in the south of Ireland, March 17, 1820. At an early age he emigrated with his parents to New York City, where he was educated.”

Patrick’s sister, Margaret, was probably born in New York City, for she was born in 1832, when Patrick was 12 years old. She died in 1905 at age 73.

Patrick and Margaret had a brother, Lester, but what became of him is lost in time. Patrick, on the other hand, became famous as a military man fighting Indians, as well as for founding Fort Douglas in Utah. He was also successful in his mission for the government, which was ‘‘to educate the Mormon people up to American views…to break the absolute rule of Brigham Young over the people…, to convince them by moral suasion, that they owed their loyalty to the United States…(and that it was) disloyal to attempt to establish a theocracy in Utah.”

In describing General Connor, the above article (p. 179) continues: ‘‘He comes from a nation of heroes, and his likeness shows the real military type of countenance. His picture, in fact, is very like our classic ideals of the Roman Centurian, when every Roman was a soldier born.” (p. 176)

Among Grandma Clara’s possessions, Phil found the Tullidge Quarterly that had been bound with Colonel Patrick Connor’s name engraved in gold leaf on it. I had it re­bound, saving much of the original binding, and Phil presented it to The Lathrop House (formerly the Patrick Connor home) in Redwood City, in June 1990. This house is open to the public as a museum.

While stationed at Fort Douglas, Patrick invested in several mineral mines, including silver, and became a very wealthy man. It is not mentioned in the periodical, but sometime between the years of 1870 and 1890 he and his family lived in their home in Redwood City, California.

There is nothing in the hand-me-down stories that tells where and how my great-grandmother Margaret, a converted Catholic, met and married William Featherstone Douglass, a Presbyterian.

Nor do I know when William came to America.

I have a picture of a woman Clara referred to as “Grandma.” The picture was duplicated in Brooklyn, but where the original was taken I don’t know. This picture of “Madam Da Fleck” (nee d’Aflec, according to Helen’s spelling of it) shows a woman wearing a full-skirted dark satin dress, looking out at the world with a solemnity that spoke of hardship. Her deepset dark eyes seemed unaccustomed to smiling. What appears to be a pleated ribbon headcovering lies close to her long, dark hair, which is parted in the middle and pulled back to reveal a lined face with high cheekbones, a strongly shaped jaw and straight mouth.

I believe the woman in the picture was William Douglass’ mother. Perhaps the Da Fleck name was her maiden name. According to Clara, she was a French Huguenot. Evidently she was among the descendants of those French Protestants who, beginning back in the 16th and 17th centuries, were persecuted by the Catholics because of their belief in the teachings of John Calvin. Just when this distant grandmother’s family left France and to what part of Great Britain they went, I don’t know. But William was a Protestant, while Margaret was a Catholic.

In a 1926 journal, Clara (my grandmother and the daughter of Margaret and William Douglass) writes of her visit in Washington, D.C., with her first cousin, Ben Powell. She mentions that she and Ben spoke about their grandparents whom they had both known. For Clara to have a first cousin with the last name of Powell would mean that Ben’s mother was a sister to one of Clara’s parents. He mother had no sister. Therefore, it seems that her father had a sister and also parents who had come to the United States. I have a small new Testament, printed in Scotland, with the name of Crawford Craig Douglass written in it. It belonged to William’s father.

I am not able to carry out the research necessary to solve the still mysterious backgrounds of Margaret Connor and William Douglass and Madam Da Fleck. I hope someone who reads this will find the answers in the Mormon collection of genealogy material and make an addendum to this family history. I do know that William died in 1904 at age 73, which would mean he was born in 1831, in Scotland or New York.

The object of the research should be to reveal where Margaret Connor and and William Douglass were born, when and where William and Margaret met, where and when they were married. We also need to know what year they came to California and where their children were born. I know only that Clara, their fourth child, was born in San Francisco. Last, but not least, where does Da Fleck fit into the scheme?

The story of the Douglass family is picked up by Margaret’s granddaughter, Helen Stanford. In a letter to me she summarized some of the later Douglass-Connor history that her mother had told her.

My mother, Helen Stanford Grimes, writes: “It was probably in 1853 that Mom’s parents, William and Margaret Douglass, came to San Francisco from New York. It was more than a month’s hazardous trip by sailing vessel around Cape Hom. Mom (Clara Douglass) used to relate to me what her mother (Margaret) had told her of the experience.” Unfortunately for the family history, my mother never passed on to me or to my brothers any of this fascinating story.

The sailing ship on which these great-grandparents came to the west coast may well have been the type of vessel called the Clipper Sailing Ship. By 1859, however, there were some ships crossing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that carried steam engines to supplement the sails so the Douglasses may have come around the Hom on such a ship.

In 1853, William was 22 and Margaret 20. Perhaps they were newlyweds. It seems unlikely that they had any children yet. Thus, probably all the Douglass children were born in San Francisco.

San Francisco was becoming an important shipping port when the Douglasses arrived there, so a ship’s chandlery appealed to William as the means to support his family. I don’t know whether he owned the chandlery business or was employed in the store. Perhaps he was a partner in the ownership, for it seems to me that he was more than a clerk, as his family lived very comfortably.

Helen writes: “The Douglasses lived for a time on the sandy slopes of the Power Street hill, just below what is now Pine Street. They moved from there, however, and the Douglass children spent their childhoods in the Mission District, where their parents bought a home near the Mission Dolories.” In the early days of San Francisco, the Mission District was the favored area in which to live. There, the sun shone brightly while the rest of the city north and west of Market Street was often blanketed in fog.

The five Douglass children, Nina, Henrietta, Stephen, Clara and Louise, known as the “black-eyed Douglasses,” were reared in the Catholic faith of their mother, and attended the local parochial school. when they grew up, however, all of them, with the exception of Louise, gave up Catholicism.

With five lively children, the large Douglass house must have been filled with great activity. I can imagine Nina, some 10 or 12 years older than the youngest sibling, as the prima donna, knowing what she wanted and how to get it by quickly dealing with any sibling who tried to replace her in her parents’ favor.

Although I never knew Nina, Mother told me that she was treated with special deference by the whole family, and especially so by her mother. She appears to have had an air about her that commanded distance and admiration. In later years, my grandmother, Clara, spoke of her in highly respectful terms, almost awe. Dresses belonging to Nina that I found in an old trunk attest to the fact that she was tall and slender, and from pictures it can be seen she was a beautiful young woman.

Sometime in the 1870s or ’80s - she was probably in her 20s by 1875 - Nina married a wealthy man named Leroy La Monte, or Lamonte, and moved with him to Australia. There she had two sons, Leroy and Douglass. Nina’s husband died, or they were divorced and she returned to San Francisco with her young boys. Within a year or two she married another wealthy man, William C. Talbot. Talbot was a partner of the Pope and Talbot Lumber Company on the west coast, which owned forects in Oregon and Washington as well as the ships to carry the lumber to distant destinations.

It was on one of these ships that Talbot sent his stepsons to sea in the belief that such an experience would “make men” of them. For years afterward, Douglass used to recount the arduous experience of these voyages (maybe only one). At any rate, our family was left with the impression that the boys had been treated roughly onboard the ship.

Nina and William had three children: Vera, the eldest, born in 1891, then William and Eric. They lived in San Francisco, but spent their summers in Redwood City, in their beautiful second home with extensive well-kept land along Camino Real, where the Redwood City High School now stands.

In later years, Nina and William Talbot were divorced and Nina lived in San Francisco. Grandma recalled that several years before Nina’s death she had developed a change in her personality, for she became irrasicible and often sought solace in solitude. Between 1910-20 following several years of enduring severe headaches, Nina died of a brain tumor.

The next sibling was shy, sensitive Henrietta, living between the shadow of Nina’s beauty and confidence and her younger brother Stephen’s favored position, ordained solely by his gender.

I remember Aunt Et very well when she was in her 60s and older. Then she was a dainty and demure-appearing woman. It was probably in the early 1890s that she married Doctor Horace Laidlaw. They moved to Hawaii, where he was a medical doctor for the Spreckles sugar plantation on Maui. They had a son, Beverly, and a daughter, Beatrice. Beverly was only a year or two older than Clara’s daughter, Helen, who had been born when Clara was 31. Et may have been only four years older than Clara. Nina must have been an only child for a long time. Or perhaps their were children between Nina and Et who died.

Before 1907 Et’s husband and daughter died within one year of each other. One of them died of a ruptured appendix and the other of a communicable disease. As a result of these tragic losses, Et was left emotionally and financially destitute. To support herself and her young son, she started a boarding house in San Francisco, but, according to her sister Clara, was abysmally inept and unsuccessful at this. Nevertheless, alone she reared young Beverly, and years later when I knew her she earned her living as a notary public.

In her later years Et lived alone in San Francisco, working as a notary until she died. Beverly served as a soldier in World War I and afterward went into the advertising business. He lived in the Los Angeles area, was married, and had one son, Beverly, Jr.

Stephen Douglass, Margaret and William’s boy, was the third child in the Douglass family. Unmarried, he was a mining engineer and the darling of his sisters. They were all grief-stricken when he was killed at the age of 27 in a mine cave-in while on an inspection tour in Australia.

Joining this trio came Clara, fighting vigorously for her own unique spot in the family, unwilling to take second place to anyone. Surely, even then, she had her own views and was not above expression them. This, I can imagine, would bring on outbursts from her much older sister, Nina, who would tolerate no threat to her position.

The youngest Douglass child, Louise, knew her place, and quietly accepted it. Yet among the girls she was the only one who prepared herself to be independent and she appeared to have enjoyed her life as a teacher. Louise, whom my brothers and I called Nannoo, was of average height, that is, about five foot four, and slender like all the Douglasses. she taught school in Glen Ellen. Margaret and William also moved to Glen Ellen in the late 1890s, where William lived until he died in 1904.

It wasn’t until Louise was about sixty that she married Dan Brereton, retired, and moved to Sausilito. I remember crossing the bay on a ferry boat to go visit her. Not many years after her marriage she died of a “tumor” in her abdomen, always spoken of in hushed whispers, in the 1930s.

The Douglass sisters had a rather explosive relationship with each other. My impression is that they had built barriers to protect their differences, and when these walls were breached a verbal fight would break out and end in a period of estrangement. Such episodes, however, would eventually be resolved and peace would reign for a while. Clara seemed to be the most vociferous in her views, though I never knew Nina, who may have been Clara’s model. et was surely the most timid. She was actually so shy she hated to eat in public and avoided it if possible.

It is my understanding, from what Helen, my mother, told me, that Margaret was the dominant parent, more aggressive, outspoken and gregarious than William whom my grandmother Clara remembered as “quiet and retiring.”

It appears that William Douglass, however, did well in providing for his family. In speaking of her childhood home, Clara used to say with pride: ‘“There was a bedroom for each of us five children.” Clara, in fact, developed very fine ideas about how life should be lived in ease and without money worries. Nina, as an example for her younger sister, certainly achieved this goal, as she was twice married to wealthy men. Clara, however, lived a very different story.

 

Tell me a story

It was just the kind of day for one of Mama’s stories, for it was cold and wintry with a forecast of rain, though the dark clouds seemed reluctant to release their burden. On opening the front door the warmth of the house felt inviting and the odor of syrup aroused my hunger. Walking across the living room I stopped only a few seconds to warm my hands at the large Heatrolla standing in front of the no longer used fireplace. I could hear my brothers talking in the dining room. They had beaten me home from school on their bikes. I didn’t ride mine as fast as they did, but that didn’t bother me. There was always plenty of time within the hour to get the five blocks from school to home and also to have a leisurely lunch and get back to school for the afternoon session. Mama called to me, “Come on in and sit down, Barbara Your fried mush is already on your plate.” Mama was Helen Stanford Grimes. I sat down across from Phil and Doug as mama brought in her plate of the cream of wheat cereal we had had for breakfast. It had been molded into small slabs about half an inch thick and allowed to cool in the ice box. For lunch it was browned on either side in the frying pan, and then eaten with butter and syrup. After I finished my first mouthful and everyone else was still swallowing theirs I broke the momentary silence and said, “This is a good day to tell a story, Mama.” My words were echoed by both Phil and Doug, for they loved Mama’s stories of the “olden days,” as much as I did. And I think Mama loved to tell them, too. “What would you like today?” she asked, laying her fork down and turning to look at each one of us. “Tell about the San Francisco earthquake,” Phil suggested. That was one of our very favorite stories, so there was no qulibilling about what story to tell this time. Through the years she would tell and retell the stories of when she was growing up in San Francisco so that they magically seemed to become a part of our own lives. She began, “It was still dark when I woke up and felt my bed shaking. It began shaking harder and harder and I heard things falling off the mantle onto the tile in front of the fireplace. I tried to get out of bed and found even the floor was moving. I was very frightened, then I saw Mama in the doorway. She was holding Leland and calling to me to stand in the doorway with her.” The earthquake story always began the same. But from time to time she would embroider on an incident or remember new things so that she held our interest every time she told the story. There were many lunches through the years that we were introduced to Mama’s friends and especially to family members, those whom we knew as our relatives. There was Leland, my mother’s younger brother, Grandpa and Grandma whom Helen called “Marna and Papa.” Papa (Grandpa) was Jerome Bonaparte Stanford. There were also Jerome’s daughters by an earlier marriage, who were our aunts, Maud and Mable and included in the relatives was Mable’s husband, Charlie Nouges. Helen’s “Mama” was Grandma Clara Douglass Stanford. Sometimes Mama would tell us a little about our great grandmother, Margaret Conner Douglass and grandfather William Featherstone Douglass. However, they had died when Mama was little, so she didn’t really know them very well, nor had her mother told her much about them. It was in the evenings of those same years between 1926 and 1931 that Dad, Peter Warneke Grimes, told us about his home, a small cottage in which he lived with his mother, father, younger brother and sister, in Ironton Ohio. His stories were always top heavy with life on his Granddad’s farm in Pedro, about 17 miles from Ironton. The descriptions and incidents that my parents told us about were fascinating windows into yesterday. Those stories became the motivation that led me through doors into the deeper past of people with short and long stories, which I have recorded the names, places and dates of people whose genes my brothers and I have inherited. Just to get a clearer picture of the gene dilution and addition I’ll list by name the lineal families who have contributed to the gene pool found in myself and Phil and Doug. Arbaugh, Miller, Nelson, Warneke, Jones, Caudil, Grimes, Stanford, Green, Morse, Cozzens, Roberts, Leland, Whitney, Douglass, Connor. All this seems to be a blend of English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch and German and then there is the name Da Fleck, introduced by a French Huguenot grandmother. Phil, Doug and I each married first generation Americans, thus introducing some new nationalities into the gene pool. Barbara’s children add Greek and Norwegian and the grandchildren add Lithuanian. Phil’s children add Italian. Doug’s children add Polish and Hungarian and his grandchildren add Swedish. In the following pages w will enter the lives of some of the people who have shared in your gene pool, i.e. your collateral relatives, and the lives of those, your lineal relatives, who have passed down genes to you, the descendants of Barbara, Philip and Douglas. [INSERT IMAGE titled “Here we are!” Photo taken byb Mirriam Johnson, at the Yacht Harbor in Palo Alto. The four of them were in Palo Alto for their High School reunion. They had spent this day together, touring old haunts from childhood. “It was great fun,” said Mirriam Johnson Jones. December 3, 1997]