The Family of
John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley
This family history website is devoted to sharing information about the family of John Sevier Branson (1826-1905) and Martha Jane Ousley (1828-1908). The site is maintained by Dave Smeds, a great-great-grandson of the couple. To read more about them, proceed to the matching pages containing their biographies and brief summaries of their ancestries. To examine the lineages of each of their ten children, click on the pertinent name.
Life and
Ancestry of John Sevier Branson
Life and
Ancestry of Martha Jane Ousley
A Simplified List of
Descendants
Their Ten Children
Sidebar Pages
Shooting
of Alvin Thorpe Branson
What
you will and will not find here:
This site includes standard data such as names, birthdates, birthplaces, deathdates, marriages, offspring, burials, of John and Martha and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. This information is rendered in biographical format, as full paragraphs. If you’re looking for charts, family group sheets, systematic listings of sources, etc., as is common on genealogical websites, my apologies. I don’t favor the raw and dry approach, and I prefer not to slavishly refer to public documents because to do so sometimes requires propagating the mistakes found in those sources. The pages are devoted to people, not to statistics. I hope you will find this approach refreshing and more interesting than the run-of-the-mill family history site.
The list of John and Martha’s children shown here is complete at ten. The list of grandchildren is complete at forty-four. This tally omits a rumored and unnamed stillborn son of John Sevier Branson, Jr., but includes all offspring who survived past birth, including Michael Harrington, who lived only three days. Sixty-five great-grandchildren are shown, which includes one adoptee and one unnamed infant of Henry Jefferson Branson who died extremely young. The number sixty-five might seem so low as to represent an incomplete tally, but the simple fact is, over a third of John and Martha’s grandchildren chose not to, or did not have the opportunity to, become parents. Also, with the turn of the 20th Century, the clan’s nuclear families shrank dramatically. Sixty-five great-grandchildren is judged to be the full count, except that a lingering question remains as to whether Harold Harrington may have had one or two half-siblings. Please note that from 2005-2016, the tally of grandchildren was described as forty-five. That is because the list included Herbert Raymond Branson, who was raised as if he were a grandson. He was however a great-grandson. He is now listed correctly among the great-grandchildren, and his only child, Iris Irene Branson, has correspondingly been re-categorized as one of John and Martha’s great great grandchildren, and as a member of that generation, does not have a biography page. Another adjustment occurred in 2025 when great-grandchild Steven Douglas Lindsey was added after DNA testing and comparison-matching revealed him to be a son of George Bertrand Johnson. The inclusion of Steve is what brought the total of great-grandchildren up to sixty-five.
With only a few exceptions, you will not find great-great-grandchildren or more recent generations described here. The majority of those individuals are still alive and I don’t want to broadcast their personal information over the web. Also missing for now are most of the specifics about the four surviving great-grandchildren. However, I maintain an extensive archive that includes all descendants I have been able to identify. At present (2025), said archive contains the names of 144 great-great-grandchildren, 279 of their children, 335 of the next generation, and 120 of the generation after that. The latter is a rapidly expanding group that will ultimately be far larger. The final generation at this time is the one after that, and contains at least one member, a girl born in 2017. The grand total of the identified descendants is now 998. This figure includes several individuals adopted as young infants, but does not include family members adopted later in life, nor does it include the clan’s plethora of stepchildren, except that one of the adoptees is a stepchild who joined the family as a small infant. (Step-children and older adoptees are included in the archive, just not in the count.) Yet this is by no means the actual total, which well exceeds one thousand. The figure of 144 great-greats (which omits one late miscarriage/stillbirth) is quite likely to be the absolute total of that generation, but you never know when there might be a surprise addition as in the case of Steve Lindsey -- in fact, DNA results caused the 144th individual to be included only as of 2026. If you want to make sure your branch is included and/or want to know more about your living cousins, email me, Dave Smeds. So as to thwart the spammers’ webcrawling address harvesters, there is no handy link to click on. Instead, I have put it into a distorted image that I think you will find to be legible:
Regarding photos: If possible, each page contains a photo. Some have multiple photos. This really helps liven up the website, and is much more compelling than plain text. You are free to download these jpgs. However, be aware that they are relatively low-resolution, small file-size versions of the images. I am happy to provide versions at high resolution suitable for top-quality print-outs, and sometimes I can supply additional images of the person or persons you are interested in, above and beyond the ones I have posted. I would love to have been able to simply upload all photos in their highest quality form, but that would have made the webpage slow to load and would take up too too much server space. I would like to express my deep appreciation to Linn, Alex, Bruce, Dona, Alice, Joyce, Sharon, Walter, Brad, Cookie, Eileen, Lowell, Kathy, Frances, Bill, Sarah, and Jo for the loan of, or the scanning of, or the gift of, the originals in their possession. If any others out there have photos to contribute, I would love to hear from you. There are still some pages that have none at all.
Some members of the modern generations are unknown to me and have yet to be included in the master archive. After some twenty years of outreach I have touched base with members of every major branch and the overall record is robust, but there are specific lines that grow murky after the 1940s. In particular, it would be highly valuable to have more input from descendants of Thomas Henry Ousley Branson. If you can supply information and/or corrections, please contact me.
Assembling this trove of family lore took a great deal of effort, most recently on my part, and earlier by other family genealogists, in particular Ivan Branson, a grandson of John and Martha through Alvin, and Bruce Branson, a great-great grandson through Reuben. I would also like to acknowledge the labors of Margaret Read, a genealogist who helped me greatly in the late summer of 2005 to firm up my documentation on the 20th Century members of the Branson clan. Margaret devoted many hours to the task even though she is not a descendant. (Though she is a relative. Margaret descends from a Hornitos family, the Bauers, who lived beside the Bransons during the Gold Rush days and intermarried with them, and all descendants of Thomas Henry Ousley Branson are her cousins through Thomas’s wife Frances Bauer.) Thanks to the efficacies of the web, information is now easy to distribute and update. This site exists to help ensure that others can obtain the information I have collected without going through a research ordeal. Please help make this record as good and as comprehensive as possible.
I began the project because I realized I wanted to know what sort of people I had sprung from, and I felt that at the very least I needed to become aware of my grandparents’ grandparents -- John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley being one of the eight pairs of my ancestors at that level. And to really know what kind of people they were, I found I needed to know what sort of people had sprung from them. I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the greater family. (And I’ve been obliged to get to know them fairly thoroughly -- even the ones I still have not met -- in order to be able to write their biographies.) It is quite a clan. We are a classic slice of the American population. The group includes authors, politicians, doctors, teachers, professors, museum directors, nurses, policemen, firemen, rodeo stars, lawyers, musicians, fine artists, soldiers, scientists, and naturally a whole bunch of (particularly in the olden days) farmers, cattle ranchers, and miners. On the bleaker side, there are alcoholics, felons (including murderers), drug addicts, unwed mothers and deadbeat dads, and various other “black sheep.” Also on the distressing side are those who, through no fault of their own, have struggled with their lives, for example as invalids, victims of crime, or as people who have suffered health impairments from the physical to the mental and emotional. There are men who fought in Vietnam, others who served at the Pentagon -- and by contrast, at least two who marched in San Francisco peace protests during the Summer of Love. There are those who stepped up and shaped their communities and others who did nothing of consequence with their entire lives. There were some who died at birth, and some who lived in good health to just shy of one hundred years old. There are many who had no children at all, and others who became parents many times over. Most of us lived or are living our lives in California, but some have ranged far, including two who resided in mainland China and another who spent sojourns in -- I kid you not -- outer Mongolia. Democrats and Republicans, country folk and urbanites, illiterates and academics, you name it. But we are all family. We are all family. We are all family.
If You Want to Copy What I’ve Written to Other Places -- ASK ME FIRST!!! While anyone is free to make use of the raw statistical data, such as the date of a birth or location of a wedding, the same liberty does not extend to copying the sentences and paragraphs of the biographies. That material was carefully assembled. It took a lot of work on my part. Writing. Rewriting. Editing. Proofreading. It’s “creative” writing and it is copyrighted by me, and the only place I want the stuff to be is right here, on this website. That’s not to say you can’t download the biographies and tuck them away on your computers to have for your own reference, it just means you shouldn’t try to distribute it to anyone else via a public platform. This is particularly the case with Ancestry.com. Do NOT put it on Ancestry.com. I have my own Ancestry.com account. If I wanted the material there, I would put it there myself. What’s the problem, you may wonder. It’s not that I’m trying to be a control freak. It’s that if people find the biographies there, it is inevitable they will be reading versions that someone uploaded a number of years in the past. The material will be lacking in any revisions or improvements I’ve made in the meantime. I want people to experience the biographies in their best, most up-to-date form. The solution is quite simple. Don’t post the text itself. Instead, post links to this website, so people can read the text here. I plan to maintain this archive here for many years to come. If someone clicks on the link, they’ll get what they need. Please do things that way, rather than spreading versions of my work that may soon be obsolete.
This site is and always has been offered free of charge. But if you find it useful, there is one way you could show your appreciation that does involve a little money. I’m not just a genealogist. I’m also an author of fiction. As in, at a professional level, for more than forty-five years. However, despite those credentials, the money doesn’t just flow in by itself. I always need new customers to purchase copies of my stuff. Please consider tracking down my books and purchasing something, whether it’s one book or half a dozen. Just search for the Dave Smeds author page on Amazon, or better yet, if you prefer to read ebooks instead of print editions, visit my author page on the site of my latest publisher, Book View Café. I really prefer that option because after all, Amazon is a monopoly and I think it’s great when small stores (even ebook-only ones like BVC) get a piece of the action instead. Here’s the link: BVC. Please do not be put off by the fact that much of what I write is in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. If that sort of material is not your thing, there is a solution: Make a purchase anyway. You could give the item to another person, or even just throw it away. While I naturally would love to lure in more readers, not just customers, a sale is a sale is a sale. It’ll still count as a customer transaction even if no one reads that copy, and said transaction not only represents income, but will boost my sales ranking which in turn causes more “foot traffic” to come my way. If you pursue this strategy to help out a poor family historian slash fiction writer, I do have one additional favor to ask. Please don’t buy used editions. Amazon loves to tout them and will try to point you toward them, and they make the price point attractive. But here’s the thing -- not one penny of whatever you pay them for that second-hand merchandise will get to me. The money goes entirely to Amazon and whatever used-book vendor is supplying them with the artifact. In particular, don’t purchase the old paperback editions of my first two novels, The Sorcery Within and The Schemes of Dragons. They exist in new editions. Please buy those instead. Not only does it help my pocketbook, but the text of those new editions is newly revised and improved. I would much rather you get to enjoy my work at its current standard, and not have to put up with fumbles I made as a beginner. Thank you!
