Gloria Susan Branson

Note: When this website went live in 2005, Gloria was one of the few surviving great-grandchildren of John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley. Inasmuch as the website does not profile living individuals, her biography was held in reserve. Now that she has died, this page can be filled in. Look forward to a full biography and more photos. What’s here now is only a placeholder.

Gloria Susan Branson, daughter of Robert Lee Branson and Nellie Margaret Reed, was born 20 January 1924 at Rand District Hospital in Red Mountain, San Bernardino County, CA, a few miles from the family residence in Randsburg, Kern County, CA. Gloria’s father had come to Indian Wells Valley at the turn of the century just as he reached adulthood. Her mother had been born and raised in Randsburg. Gloria was part of Robert’s second family. Gloria had two older half-siblings. However, she encountered her half-brother Donald Huntington Branson only on rare occasions, and she may never have met her half-sister Marjorie, who died of leukemia when Gloria was only eight years old. Her full sister Norma and full brother Dan were those with whom she was raised and whom she knew best. Together those three spent their childhood on the family ranches in the upper Mojave Desert, first on the one near Randsburg, then on another near Cantil.

As she was wrapping up her stint at Randsburg High School, Gloria wed Joe C. Jones (full name Charles Joseph Jones, but he almost never went by it), son of Joseph Olney Jones and Adaline (aka Adelina) Dunham. Joe had been born in Tucson, AZ 25 April 1920, but his family, including his maternal grandparents Charles and Trinidad Dunham, had come out to Los Angeles County in the mid-1920s. He had thereafter been raised in Sherman Oaks, Beverly Hills, and Venice while his father worked as a streetcar conductor. Gloria and Joe met as a byproduct of his military service. He had joined the U.S. Army 16 October 1941 and would go on to serve during World War II in the Air Corps. This brought him to the Inyokern region of the desert, where the military had chosen to construct training-and-development airbases on a scale never before seen. The wedding took place 23 May 1942. (The couple are shown at right in the early 1940s.) The union resulted in three children but did not endure into the 1950s. In 1950, Gloria settled in Ridgecrest, Kern County, CA, putting her once again near her parents, who had moved to that town during the war years. For the most part, Ridgecrest remained Gloria’s home from then on.

Two days after her thirtieth birthday, on 22 January 1954, Gloria wed George David Padgett, son of George Padgett and Minnie White, born 30 March 1923 in Los Angeles County, CA, with whom she had two more children. Like Joe, he had served in World War II, in his case doing so in the U.S. Marine Corps. In civilian life he operated a tax and accounting service firm. The marriage also ended in divorce. George relocated to Las Vegas, NV. He would go on to marry again in 1972, and then in 2000, shortly after becoming a widower, he married a third time. Gloria, however, chose to forge on as a single woman. She went to work for Comarco and Associates in 1965, staying until retirement in 1986 at age sixty-two.

Gloria excelled as a homemaker and was a great cook. Reading, sewing, and gardening were among her pastimes.

Gloria’s father made it to age ninety-eight, and her half-brother Donald made it to just short of ninety-seven. Gloria didn’t match those marks, but she wasn’t far off. Unfortunately that meant she had to endure the loss of several close family members over the years. Her sister Norma passed away in 1998, her brother Dan in 2012, even though they were younger than she. To her sorrow she also outlived a child. Her daughter Jo Ann died in 1985 at only forty years old. Gloria outlived both ex-husbands as well. Joe C. Jones passed away in Ridgecrest 4 August 1998. George David Padgett perished 21 Jun 2005 in Henderson, Clark County, NV.

In her late eighties, after suffering a stroke in 2012, Gloria entered an assisted-living facility in Thousand Oaks, Ventura County, CA, a short distance from the home of her eldest surviving daughter. She passed away peacefully at Los Robles Hospital in Thousand Oaks 5 July 2014 in the presence of multiple family members.

Descendants of Gloria Susan Branson

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