John Sweden McDonald

John Sweden McDonald, eldest son of Phoebe Ann Branson and William McDonald, was born 8 February 1875 in Merced, Merced County, CA. His nickname was Jack. (Please ignore the early versions of this biography where it is given as Jock. That was a mistake that sprang from how poorly the name “Jack” was rendered in a couple of the handwritten sources used in the research process.)

John and his siblings are not to be confused with a group of grandchildren of Nancy Anna Branson, who were also named McDonald. The “other” McDonald family mentioned on this website are the children of John’s first cousin Mary Josephine Harrington and his first cousin Charles Sweden McDonald. Yes, John was a first cousin of both the husband and wife of that pair. Charles and John’s middle names sprang from their mutual grandfather, Sweden MacDonald, a pioneer of Galt, Ontario Province, Canada who had come there in the 1830s from Scotland. This patriarch of the family had altered his last name from MacDonald to McDonald some time not long after settling in his new homeland, apparently so that he could blend in better with neighbors of Irish extraction.

John’s mother suffered from some sort of severe and chronic health issue during the 1880s. This led to her death in the summer of 1887, when John was twelve years old. It is thought his mother’s sister Theresa Branson helped care for John and his siblings when Phoebe became too weak to handle the load herself, and then continued to help after Phoebe died. John also could count on the support, nurturance, and supervision provided by his other aunts Nancy Anna Branson Harrington and Mary Jane Branson Johnson, who together operated a boarding house just a short walk from the McDonald home. The boarding house was undoubtedly the very place where aforementioned first cousins Charles McDonald and Josephine Harrington got to know one another, and it was even John’s own place of residence for a few years after he reached adulthood.

Just after John turned seventeen, his father married his second wife, Agnes Dunn. The latter became a beloved figure to her stepkids and would go on to be the “glue” that kept the bonds tight within the William McDonald clan. John was among those who treasured the connection to Agnes, though the amount of time he spent under the same roof with her was limited, due to being as old as he was when his father married her.

As the son of a wheelwright, John naturally slipped into jobs that made use of his knowledge of tools, hardware, and machinery. The 1900 census shows him as a blacksmith (perhaps working for his father). In 1910, he was a hardware store saleman. By 1911, he became a salesman of farm implements, a career he kept until retirement aside from one or two interruptions. His father was his partner in this enterprise for three years, until a month before his death in mid-1914. (The elder McDonald’s case of liver disease made him unable to continue running his blacksmith shop.)

John married Josephine Samantha Johnson, better known as Josie Johnson, 24 April 1902 in Merced at the home of his father and stepmother, Reverend F.Z. King officiating. After a honeymoon in the Los Angeles area, the couple established their first home back in Merced. Josie had been born 13 February 1875 in Verona, Lawrence County, MO. She was the youngest of many children of James Lewis Johnson (known as Lewis) and Caroline Housley, both natives of Tennessee. Caroline Housley was a sister of Martha Jane Ousley, John’s grandmother, meaning that Josie was his mother Phoebe’s first cousin. Josie is not to be confused with John’s own first cousin Josephine Harrington McDonald. This is an easy confusion to make for many reasons, including that the two Josephines were only four years apart in age.

A history of the John Sevier Branson family written in 1931 by Mary Eliza Simmons Branson (a sister-in-law of Phoebe Branson McDonald) indicates that Josie was earlier married to a man with the surname of Strand, Straul, or Stroud. (The handwriting in the original document is difficult to decipher.) The newspaper coverage of the wedding presents her last name as Stroh, Strow, and Strot. These variations of the name may all be wrong, and so the identity of this first husband remains a mystery and the circumstances of the marriage are equally vague, except that the union was obviously brief and did not result in offspring.

Nor did Josie become a mother while married to John. However, in their case it is clear the childlessness was not a result of marital friction. All indications are John and Josie were a loving couple for the entire span of their thirty-eight-year union. The reason probably had to do with health factors. John is likely to have been afflicted by hereditary haemochromatosis. Haemochromatosis is a metabolic disorder that interferes with the proper absorption of iron, leading to iron overload, which in turn can lead to liver failure, heart failure, and diabetes, among other unpleasant effects. Haemochromatosis is likely to be what caused Sweden McDonald to die in his early forties. The factor is undoubtedly what led to John’s father’s case of liver problems. It must have been what caused John’s younger brother Billy to die at age twenty-nine, struck by a sudden attack of symptoms in the summer of 1907 while staying at John and Josie’s home. Eventually it would shorten the lives of nearly all the rest of the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of Sweden McDonald, including John himself. Even today some modern-day male descendants of Sweden McDonald have the gene and are obliged to monitor their iron intake carefully. In John’s time, the precise nature of the disease was not well understood, but it was known it was a family trait and John had every reason to assume he was a carrier. John and Josie may have deliberately avoided having children so as not to burden offspring with this legacy. Or it is possible he was unable to sire children. One of the “other unpleasant effects” referred to above is testicular failure.

John and Josie spent their first fifteen years of married life in Merced. John came out of the shadow of his father upon becoming a husband, and maintained a healthy level of independence. An example is when he ceased working at the blacksmith shop and became a hardware store merchant. Also, he and Josie did not live with William and Agnes on 21st Street, but had their own home on Central Avenue. That said, the familial bond remained strong, and was one of the things that led to the partnership selling farm implements from 1911 to 1914. The death of his father was surely a blow John felt severely, especially coming as it did when William was only in his mid-sixties. Grief may have soured John’s affection for Merced, even though he had lived there since birth, a span approaching forty years. When a career opportunity called for him to become based in Kern County, John accepted. He and Josie moved to Bakersfield. It would be nearly twenty years before they came back north.

While residents of Bakersfield, John and Josie did not plant themselves in one particular residence. Their homes were undoubtedly rentals and they stayed no more than a few years at each spot. Also, in addition to moving around within Bakersfield, they spent an interval in Los Angeles. This interruption was brief. The only documentation that places them in L.A. is the 1920 census, and it is possible they were there no more than a few months. Alternately, they may have lived there for much of the span between 1919 and 1924. By 1924 at the latest, the pair returned to Bakersfield and remained into the early 1930s.

During the midst of the Great Depression, John and Josie came back to the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. Jobs were a challenge to find and hold on to. The couple moved repeatedly. Records show them at five different addresses between 1934 and 1941. For most of that span they dwelled in Modesto, Stanislaus County, CA, though they did spend at least part of 1935 back in Merced, where John worked as a salesman for Montgomery Ward & Co. Josie supplemented the household income as a seamstress. Eventually John secured a relatively good situation as a clerk for Stanislaus Implements & Hardware Company of Modesto.

John passed away on Friday afternoon, 14 November 1941 at the home he and Josie shared on Oak Street in Modesto. In making it to age sixty-six, he had lived longer than any male of the Sweden McDonald line had yet managed. (Happily, his double-cousin-once-removed Elton McDonald would beat that mark, as would his cousin Stephen Blaine MacDonald of New Jersey.) He had seen younger siblings go to their graves. Even so, he was undeservedly deprived of the chance to enjoy his twilight years. The haemochromatosis had a lot to answer for. Even his stepmother Agnes survived him, though this was in part because she was less than four years his senior.

John was buried on Monday afternoon of 17 November 1941 in the McDonald plot in the Knights of Pythias Cemetery, one of several adjacent cemeteries that now form the much-larger Merced Cemetery District. Today the McDonald plot is home to the graves of nearly all of John’s immediate family, including his wife, parents, stepmother, siblings Nancy and Billy, half-brother Maurice Ellsworth McDonald (born after John had grown up and left home), and brother-in-law Roy Ames Price.

Josie would go on to survive John by many years. Generally speaking they were not years she enjoyed much. She was destitute and largely bereft of a support system, though at first she could count on the maternal presence of Agnes Dunn McDonald. But Agnes died in 1947 and away went her sweetening influence on family members. John’s surviving sister Teresa Garibaldi and half-brother Ellsworth McDonald couldn’t be bothered to check in on Josie. Nor was Josie able to check in on them because that same year she suffered a heart attack and was advised by her doctor to exert herself as little as possible. Nor was it easy to pop in on anyone in turn. Josie did not own an automobile. Even visiting the cemetery to put flowers on John’s grave grew impractical. Taxi fare was a dollar. That was more than she could afford.

A friend came through. She was DeLane Frances Harper, who despite being nearly forty years younger than Josie had become friends with her in Modesto, probably through Order of the Eastern Star lodge meetings. When DeLane and her husband Hollis Radford Harper moved to Oakdale, Stanislaus County, CA in the late 1940s, Josie was encouraged to move there as well, and so she did. She appears there in the 1950 census (on her own, not with the Harpers). How long she remained in Oakdale altogether is not clear. Eventually DeLane and Hollis relocated to Reno, NV. If Josie had not already returned to Merced by that point, she soon did so. Ultimately she passed away 18 March 1964 in a Merced hospital.

By the time Josie died Ellsworth McDonald had been dead for fifteen years but Teresa Garibaldi was still alive and was still based in Merced. The extent to which the women had become estranged is apparent from reading between the lines of the Fresno Bee article about Josie’s death, which states that Josie had “no known relatives” and the funeral home, Ivers & Alcorn of Merced, was awaiting the arrival from Reno of “long time friend Mrs. DeLane Harper” before determining final arrangements. Teresa perhaps went on to attend the services and may have contributed to the burial fund, but she did go so far as to hire a stonecutter to create a headstone for Josie, as had been done for every other family member interred in the McDonald plot aside from William and Agnes’s firstborn unnamed son, who had died back in 1893 at only a few weeks of age. To this day there is no indication above ground that Josie is at rest there with John.

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