Evalena Branson

Evalena Branson, first daughter and third of the eight children of Thomas Henry Ousley Branson and Frances Bauer, was born 23 May 1877 on her parents’ rural property near Quartzburg, a mining outpost (a settlement that would often be better known in the late 1870s and early 1880s as Washington Mine) a couple of miles north of Hornitos, Mariposa County, CA. This home was quite close to or perhaps even a section of “Grasshopper Ranch,” the homestead of her paternal grandparents John and Martha Branson. Evalena enjoyed a stable and nurturant upbringing. Her father worked variously as a tinsmith, blacksmith, carpenter, and miner, along with one other occupation one would not expect of a fellow born in Missouri -- Thomas occasionally served as a Chinese-English interpreter for the Mariposa County court, able to do so because as a young boy he had learned to speak Chinese by hanging out with the cooks in the mining camps. Evalena also acquired a familiarity with the city of Merced, Merced County, CA because until the mid-1880s, her father co-owned and operated a tinsmithing-and-hardware firm, Branson & Barcroft, a business headquartered in Merced. Evalena did not think of herself as “from” Merced, though, because the family did not maintain a home there. Thomas typically commuted there on his own, and when the whole family did come along, they stayed with relatives.

(The photo at left may not be Evalena -- though it probably is. If it is not her, it is her sister Alice or Alma.)

In 1897, when Evalena was twenty, Evalena’s uncle Joe Branson expanded his already-sizable cattle ranch by absorbing the properties of his parents and brother. As part of the rearrangement, Thomas and Frances relocated into the village of Hornitos. The residence they acquired was quite possibly the former home of Frances’s brother Michael Bauer and family. It was along Burns Creek in a part of Hornitos considered to be the “Chinese” section of the community -- a borough some whites avoided but where the Bransons fit in well.

Evalena’s somewhat unusual name was often mis-recorded. It was pronounced with an EYE nah sound at the end, not EEE nah or EHH nah. (An easy way to explain it is that it rhymed with China.) Her nickname was usually rendered as Lena when written, but was Lyna when spoken. Census enumerators and newspaper reporters rendered it as Evelyn, Evalina, or Evelyn A. On a genealogical list compiled by a family member back in the 1940s, it was rendered Evelyna, and this was the version used on this website from its inception in the autumn of 2005 until early 2009, when the question was revisited upon finding the photograph of her gravemarker shown below. Now Evalena is regarded as the true spelling. Evalena is the version shown on the 1930 census and on her California Death Index entry. While these documents might have been subject to informants other than the woman herself, Evalena is also the version used in voter registers. She was surely the person who filled out her voter registration application, so it would appear she used and preferred the Evalena spelling. It may be that her parents considered her to be an Evelyna, but she had other ideas. In deference to her choice, this website now refers to her as Evalena. One thing all sources agree on is that she was known mostly by her nickname.

The Branson-Bauer family was extremely tight-knit and most of the brood lingered with Thomas and Frances into adulthood. Evalena was the first to leave, but not until she was in her twenties and then only because her uncle Frank Bauer had died and his widow, Elizabeth Powers Bauer, needed a nanny to move into her home in Oroville, CA to help care for her young children. Evalena is shown in that household in the 1900 census.

Evalena’s sojourn in Oroville was not long -- perhaps only a matter of months. She returned to Hornitos. At first, she must have stayed with her parents, but by 1902, her father was working at Mount Bullion mining outpost and her parents were spending a lot of their time there. Evalena visited them regularly, but appears to have personally remained based in Hornitos, either holding down the fort at the Burns Creek residence, or more likely staying with Bauer relatives. For the moment, this was a reasonable arrangement, but it became awkward. In the span from mid-1902 to the beginning of 1903, her sisters Alice, Mabel, and Alma became wives. Suddenly there was Evalena, the eldest girl of the family, still unwed at age twenty-four. She had become an old maid, and escaping the embarrassment of that was hard to do when she was in full view of the women of the community in which she’d been raised. The solution? In the summer of 1904, she went to live with her uncle John Sevier Branson, Jr. and his wife Lillian (Guest) in Madera, Madera County, CA. Her uncle and aunt, whose boys Joe and Henry were now thirteen and ten, respectively, had become based in that town only a couple of years earlier. They had previously opened their home in sequence to Evalena’s first cousins Mamie, Mattie, and Mabel, daughters of Reuben Branson. Apparently John and Lillian found it very agreeable to have a second adult female in the household. That arrangement was something Lillian in particular must have liked, given that she was otherwise surrounded only by males. Evalena stayed long-term -- at least until 1907, and quite possibly until 1910.

One of the young men living in Madera during that same period was Charles Orlando Diffin. A son of James Orlando Diffin and Frances Darby, born 14 September 1873, Charles was a native of Antioch in the delta region of Contra Costa County. The family had moved to Madera and that is where he resided as a young man with his brother William Henry Diffin and their widower father in the wake of the 1895 death of Frances Darby Diffin. Given the small size of the town at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, it was inevitable that sooner or later he and Evalena would cross paths. The precise date of their introduction is unknown, but it was probably in the early part of the 1904-1910 period, which is to say they probably had a leisurely courtship in the style of a “mature” set of sweethearts.

Evalena and Charles were wed April, 1910 at the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Merced, Reverend James Miles Webb presiding. The event was reported in the April 23rd issue of the Mariposa Gazette, a Saturday newspaper, as having occurred “Thursday morning at ten o’clock.” If that refers to the Thursday immediately prior to publication, it means the ceremony took place on April 21st. But the Gazette obtained the news from the Merced Express, and the reference to Thursday may have come from an issue of that newspaper published before the 21st. Therefore it is possible the wedding occurred on the 14th.

Curiously, the wedding article mentions that the ceremony was witnessed by the bride’s mother, brothers, and a sister. If this is literally accurate, it prompts one to wonder where Evalena’s father and her other sisters were. The article also mentions that the couple had departed for their honeymoon in San Francisco, and were to then reside in Antioch. And so they did. Once settled in, the pair do not appear to have ever made their home anywhere other than in Antioch. That community continued to be home to Charles’s relatives as well, the Madera chapter of their story having been wrapped up. The fact that Evalena was in Antioch had the effect of separating her from her roots. She seems to have cleaved to her husband’s family rather than her own. That is not to say there was a rift. She is known to have kept in regular contact with her sister Alice, among others, and it is quite likely that Evalena was the main organizer of a huge Branson-clan reunion held at Mount Diablo in 1939. However, her in-laws were close at hand while her blood kin required more effort to keep in touch with, so inevitably some drifting away took place. For that reason, information about Evalena is somewhat skimpy in family correspondence, and as a consequence, this biography is limited in scope compared to those of some of her siblings and first cousins.

Charles worked at a variety of jobs. During the 1910s, he was a salesman for L. (Leopold) Meyer Company, a general-merchandise firm that had been operating in Antioch since Charles’s early childhood. Later he would be a salesman at a department store, a hardware salesman, and a watchman at a chemical plant. Evalena was a homemaker. This was a somewhat easier lifestyle than it might have been because unlike her parents, she had a very small family. In this, she was like her four sisters, who averaged two children each. Her three brothers had no children at all. Evalena was in the middle in that respect. She gave birth to one child. He was Cyril Gibson Diffin, born in 1916. By then, Evalena was reaching the trailing edge of her childbearing years. It may be that she had planned not to become a mother at all, but had changed her mind when faced with the prospect of having to live with that decision in old age.

For the first decade or so of the couple’s married life, Evalena and Charles occupied a rental on Fifth Street. In the 1920s, they bought the house in which they would spend the rest of their lives. That residence was at 522 Tenth Street.

Evalena and Charles completed the raising of their son and Charles reached retirement age before he passed away 9 March 1941 of heart disease. Evalena survived him by over six years, passing away 31 December 1947 of pneumonia brought on by terminal cancer. Old sources say both husband and wife were buried in Antioch at M & O Cemetery, but this would appear to be an obsolete name for that site. The shared gravemarker is currently to be found at Oak View Memorial Park.

Child of Evalena Branson with Charles Orlando Diffin

Cyril Gibson Diffin

For genealogical details, click on Cy’s name.

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