Mabel Grace Branson

Mabel Grace Branson, daughter of Reuben Branson and Eliza Louisa Armstrong, was born 29 October 1882 in Mariposa County, CA, probably at or near a gold-mining camp where her father was working. Hite’s Cove is a possible precise location, as the census shows the family there in 1880. Mabel, an identical twin of Mattie Branson, is not to be confused with her first cousin Mabel H. Branson, daughter of Reuben’s brother Thomas, born at Hornitos almost exactly one year earlier, nor is she to be confused with her first cousin Grace Mildred Branson, daughter of Reuben’s brother Joseph, born near Hornitos in 1885. Some within-the-family records spell her first name Mable, but most official documents use Mabel.

Mabel was raised in the foothills of Mariposa and Madera County. (While Mabel was a small child, Madera County did not yet exist; the territory it is now comprised of was then part of Fresno County.) The family frequently shifted its base from various mining sites or the places Reuben worked as a lumberman, sawmill worker, and blacksmith. These places include the Potter Ridge and Grub Gulch areas. By the middle of the 1890s, as William and David, the oldest sons of the family, became old enough to help with financial support, Louisa chose to stop moving about -- even though Reuben continued to roam in search of opportunities -- and settled into a house in the quarry town of Raymond in Madera County.

During the Raymond years Mabel, along with her twin sister, must have been increasingly called upon to be a young woman of the household. One reason for this was her comparatively robust health. Her eldest brother William died of pneumonia, her brother David was somewhat mentally retarded, her older sister Mamie became hampered either by polio or an untreated hip dislocation. Thus, even though Mabel and Mattie were middle children, they were expected to be responsible. Mabel also worked outside the home as a live-in domestic servant, as did all her sisters at one time or another due to the family’s weak financial circumstances.

In the latter part of 1900 Reuben Branson took a job with the Yellow Aster Mining Company in the Indian Wells Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada range, in Kern County near the corners of Inyo and San Bernardino Counties. The family moved to Randsburg, a company town. Mabel was old enough to be out on her own but it is thought she came along, being still a teenager. However, the dawn of the 20th Century brought the dissolution of Reuben and Louisa’s marriage. If she had not already departed, Mabel left some time during this period of tension. In 1902 Mattie Branson died of pneumonia. It is probable that Mabel was close to her sister the way that twins often are, and this loss contributed to Mabel establishing an independent existence.

Mabel went to Los Angeles, where she wed Jerome Clarence Harter 8 June 1903. Better known at that point of his life as Clarence J. Harter, he was a son of Joseph M. and Jennie Harter, a couple from the Ohio River Valley who had settled in Joplin, Jasper County, MO in the 1890s. Born 16 March 1882 in Indiana, Clarence was only seven months older than Mabel, meaning he was the only one of her husbands to be close to the same age as she. They seemed to have been well suited to one another in terms of life circumstances, both coming to the marriage as young singles far from their point of origin and out in the world on their own, yet it was not a lasting marriage. In fact, Mabel erased it from her life story so thoroughly that knowledge of the union was not part of this biography when it was first uploaded in late 2005; the facts surfaced through follow-up research undertaken in the autumn of 2009. However, the pair seem to have stayed together a good half a dozen years. Clarence appears in the 1910 census as a lodger in a home in Kern County, CA, and while he and Mabel were no longer living together at that juncture, he is still categorized as a married individual. Assuming that categorization was correct, the divorce occurred soon after, perhaps as early as the latter part of 1910, but certainly by 1912. Clarence went on to marry Margaret Mortenson in 1913 and settle into a life with her in Bakersfield, Kern County, CA, where he was employed for many years as a house painter and had such sideline ventures as operating Grogg’s Theater. With Margaret, he sired two children, Stanley Morrison Harter and Gertrude A. Harter, in the mid-1910s. Clarence -- by then going by Jerome C. Harter or even just J. C. Harter -- passed away young, perishing 20 September 1927 in Bakersfield.

By 1910, Louisa and many of her younger children had also chosen to settle in Los Angeles County. It may well have been Mabel’s presence that helped bring them there, though her whereabouts between 1903 and 1910 have not been verified and it could be she temporarily went to Kern County with Clarence. By 1910, single again though perhaps still not quite divorced in the technical sense, Mabel entered into a romance with George Elisha Latham. A son of Samuel Turner Latham and Myrtle Gadsby (aka Mercy Louette Gadsby), George had been born and raised in Sandy Lake, Mercer County, PA and had come out to southern California as a young man and become a barber in Pomona, Los Angeles County, CA. Born 19 February 1886, he was three-and-a-half years younger than Mabel. It was normal back then for wives to be younger than their husbands and when it did happen the other way, the difference was usually slight. Mabel may have been self-conscious about being markedly older than George. This seems to have been part of her personality. Throughout life she often mis-reported her age, making herself seem younger. Even on the 1903 marriage license, she shrank her age by a year. While married to George, she took this tendency to new level, reporting (in the 1920 census) that she and he were the same age. The couple were married 12 September 1912 in Los Angeles. At the time of the wedding, George was attempting to make a living as an oil driller, but he must not have found the oil-industry work to his liking, because he immediately resumed being a barber. For the first two to three years of the marriage, Mabel and George resided at 114 S. Olive in central L.A. Mabel’s sister Margaret and brother-in-law Ed Gaver and family temporarily shared these quarters in 1913. In 1915 or 1916, Mabel and George moved to 1217 W. 88th Street. This put them in a neighborhood that could be described as the eastern section of Inglewood or western section of Florence. (Mabel and George are shown in front of their 88th Street residence in the photo at right.) Various family members, especially Mabel’s younger sister Gertie, would continue to inhabit that general portion of Los Angeles County for years to come. For Mabel, the interlude was brief.

Reuben Branson sought the shelter of Mabel and George’s home in the spring of 1916, as he was dying of abdominal cancer. George registered to vote at that address in 1916. Those two specific, dated events establish that Mabel and George were still in California in 1916, but within the next two years, they relocated to Mercer County, PA, into the fold of George’s kinfolk. George’s World War I draft card, filed on 12 September 1918, confirms the couple were then living in Stoneboro.

Mabel and George remained spouses for almost twenty years. During the first part of their Pennsylvania phase -- and perhaps coinciding with their arrival -- Mabel took in her niece, Margaret Brandy Gaver (“Little Margaret”), an arrangement that relieved her sister Margaret Alice Branson of childcare responsibilities while Margaret was living in a tent in the desert in Arizona, far from schools. Mabel’s nephew Edgar Robert Gaver may have been part of the package as well, at least for a little while. Sending the two Gaver kids to Mabel was a way they would still be connected to their maternal family, yet be near their father, Edgar Leroy Gaver, who had come back east after divorcing Margaret Branson. The kids were already accustomed to living under Mabel’s roof because they had done so in 1913.

Being a surrogate mother was as close as Mabel got to being a parent. It seems quite clear she was infertile. This may have been why her first marriage crumbled. Family gossip strongly implies it was the factor that ended her marriage to George as well. Childlessness was apparently not a condition George wished to endure. Confronted with his discontent, Mabel sued for divorce in 1930 and it was granted in January, 1931. The couple spent the final fragment of their union in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, OH, where they occupied an apartment house at 1709 E. 115th Street with George’s barbershop partner, Millard Evans, and his wife Theo, along with a quartet of other lodgers. They are shown there in the 1930 census -- Mabel (as Mable) was by then claiming to be only thirty-seven years old, a full decade younger than reality. Her occupation in that document is “beauty work.”

Only six months later, in early July, 1931, George married Emma Rosella Bacher, daughter of John Bacher and Mary Elizabeth Houseman. She was a Stoneboro gal, and quite possibly an old flame of his. The wedding -- which appears to have taken place at Niagara Falls, though the paperwork was processed in nearby Lockport -- immediately made him a stepfather to Francis, Clara, and Edward Strausser, the grown children of her first marriage to Frank Strausser. At forty-three years of age, and nineteen years a widow, Emma may have imagined she and George would have a leisurely courtship, but a pregnancy -- quite possibly an unexpected development given her age -- speeded their plans along. Daughter Georgene Elizabeth Latham was born 22 December 1931. She was to be George’s only biological child. After a bit more time in Ohio, George and Emma settled again in Stoneboro and raised their baby girl. They remained in Stoneboro until 1967, when at age eighty-one George finally gave up being a barber and retired. The couple spent their twilight years in rural Grove City, Mercer County, PA, where George died 6 April 1973 at the home of his stepdaughter, Clara Strausser Thompson. Mabel had become so erased from his life story that she not only went unmentioned in his obituary, but there is no reference to an early marriage at all, nor to any period he may have spent in California, nor even to the interval in Cleveland. He is described as having spent sixty-five years as a barber in Stoneboro and having “spent all of his life in the Sandy Lake-Stoneboro area until moving to Grove City six years ago.”

Single again, Mabel must have “gone home to Mother.” That is to say, she moved in with her mother while deciding what to do with the rest of her life. By this point, Louisa was living in Milton-Freewater, Umatilla County, OR, having moved there in the mid-1920s after marrying her second husband Joseph “Papa Joe” Eagle. Being in Oregon must have been the means through which Mabel met Alfred Wallace Bayn, the man who would become her next husband. Alfred, subsequently remembered mainly by his informal moniker of “Doc Bayne,” was introduced to Mabel by Alene Reid Branson, first wife of Mabel’s younger brother Herbert Raymond Branson. Herbert and Alene had come north with or shortly after Louisa and Papa Joe and were residing not too far away in Washington state.

Doc was a widower. His wife of over forty years, the former Grace Estelle Bussing, had perished 23 April 1931. Though Mabel and Doc possibly met up in Milton-Freewater, once they were married (the wedding taking place some time between 1931 and 1934), they settled in Doc’s home near Bend, Deschutes County, OR. (Earlier, Doc and Grace, both from Michigan, had also lived just over the county line in the Powell Butte area of Crook County, where they raised two daughters.) Mabel, Doc, and Mabel’s sister Mamie operated an inn. (Mamie’s legs may not have been the same length, but she did not allow that handicap to stop her from living an active life.) The inn may have been known as Bigelow’s, perhaps after a former owner. (Mabel is shown at Bigelow’s in the photograph slightly higher to the left. It is particularly nice to have this view of her. All of the other available photos from the middle part of her life, including those shown within this biography, were taken outdoors and show her with her eyes narrowed to block the glare of the sun. Seeing her without the furrowed brow made it easier for us to appreciate the Mabel that caught the eye of Doc Bayne.) The partnership lasted only a short time, because Mamie died in early 1935 and Doc only lasted a year more. He passed away 26 February 1936 in Bend.

Why Alfred Bayn was nicknamed Doc is a mystery, as he does not appear to have earned a doctorate in any discipline, much less medicine. A son of Francis Bayn and Helen E. Ganson, he had been born 14 November 1870 in Jackson County, MI. He had married Grace Bussing 12 February 1890 and that year or early in 1891 the couple had come to Oregon, first to Portland, then to Crook County before 1910. The family name is rendered as Bayn, Bayne, and Bean in very old records, and even Alfred himself was not consistent about the “e” on the end. His signature appears both ways, and some public records use one version, some the other. By the end of his life he seems to have tended to use Bayne, but he was late in settling upon it.

The marriage to Doc had a lasting effect on Mabel’s existence despite the limited time they had together, because she inherited a considerable amount of property from him. (One can only imagine what Alfred’s two surviving daughters thought of losing any part of the estate to a woman who had been part of his life for no more than a small fragment of a decade.) The endowment left Mabel in as comfortable a circumstance financially as she had ever enjoyed. It also cemented her loyalty to Oregon, where she would remain until well into her eighties.

Because Mabel was Oregon-based, she was obliged to spend a certain amount of time helping care for her aged mother. Louisa ultimately contracted cancer that cost her a finger and then an arm, both through amputation in an effort to curtail the spread of the disease. Given how poorly she was doing, Mabel moved temporarily up to Milton-Freewater, though perhaps not until 1939, when Louisa was in the final stages of her decline. Louisa passed away that year in late November. One of the things Mabel is famous for among the clan was her determination to bring her mother’s body back to Arbor Vitae Cemetery in Madera, CA to be buried next to family members, a move opposed by Joe Eagle. Mabel made the arrangements anyway and by the time Papa Joe found out what she had done, the body and coffin were on the train headed south and it was too much trouble and expense for him to put a stop to the whole business. The compromise was her promise to send his body down to Madera when the time came, a promise she kept.

Mabel returned to Bend soon after her mother’s passing. In 1947, she served as the informant on Papa Joe’s death certificate, and that document confirms her address at that point in time was Bend. After that -- perhaps as early as 1947 itself -- she made Milton-Freewater her home. This would remain the case throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The likely scenario is that she inherited the house from Papa Joe and decided to move into it. This would have freed her up to sell Doc Bayne’s property and make some sort of settlement with Doc’s daughters Gladys and Hazel. (These daughters, by the way, may not have been on speaking terms with one another. It would seem that Hazel may have stolen her elder sister Gladys’s husband, James Arthur Milner, just a few years after the pair were wed. It could be things were more civilized than that, but it isn’t apparent from public records. The two sisters maintained a large geographical distance from one another once Hazel had become the new Mrs. Milner, a separation still in effect fifty years down the line.)

Mabel’s last name was still Bayn on the 1947 death certificate, i.e. she had not remarried. Earlier in her life she had not been the sort of woman who liked to live alone -- but earlier in her life, she had needed the financial security a husband represented. Once she inherited Doc’s money, she could get by as a single woman, and it appears she did so for a full twenty years and then some. Finally, though, she took another trip down the aisle.

Mabel’s fourth and final known husband was William Isaac Henry. Branson-family kinfolk knew him as Bill Henry, and would recall that he was a preacher. If that latter detail is true, the occupation was a part-time calling and/or something he fell into in retirement. Public records consistently describe him as a carpenter. Those same records allow his history to be sketched in like so: A son of Charles Albert Henry and Isabelle (“Belle”) Zora Duckworth, the second or third of that couple’s nine children, Bill was a native of Illinois, probably of Hancock County. Born 8 March 1885, he was not yet ten years old when his parents relocated the family to a farm in Walnut Grove Township, Neosho County, KS. In the early Twentieth Century, they went on to another farm in Bazine Township, Ness County, KS (a county so rural it still, to this day, has no incorporated towns). When it came time to establish a home of his own, Bill chose to remain in Bazine Township, though not immediately adjacent to his parents. He may not have made that move until he became a married man. That event took place in the mid-to-late 1910s. His first wife, ten years his junior and a native of Kansas, was Louise Edith, maiden name unknown. The pair adopted a baby boy in 1919, whom they named Herbert Harold Henry. Late in the 1920s the couple apparently finally produced biological daughters, though give how long they waited, it seems possible they were more adoptees. The daughters were Opal and Ruby. Toward the end of the 1930s, Bill came west to investigate new employment opportunities. As a result, he and Louise and the kids became based in Milton-Freewater, where Louise died in 1957.

Some time after Bill became a widower, he married Mabel. Chances are the pair had been acquainted for years. The date of the wedding is not precisely known. Family correspondence from 1963 refers to Mabel and Bill in such a way as to confirm they were husband and wife by then. (That correspondence included the photograph of the couple reproduced at left.) There is no indication of a divorce so the marriage’s end point is easy to determine: Bill died 15 August 1969 in Milton-Freewater.

As she reached extreme old age, Mabel became senile. This was probably Alzheimer’s Disease. She became a target of confidence men. She took in her newsboy, practically adopting him. After a while, as one might expect, she no longer had as much money in her bank accounts as she should have had. Her brother Herbert -- Blondy -- came to the rescue, settling her estate and bringing her south to live in a rest home in Long Beach, where he could check on her regularly. Blondy passed away in 1974, but his widow Marion Mattice Branson continued to tend to Mabel. Mabel finally expired at the Long Beach rest home Saturday, 19 April 1975. She had reached ninety-two years of age and had outlived all of her siblings except Robert, who survived a few more years and ultimately died at age ninety-eight. She was buried Friday, 25 April 1975 at Rose Hills Memorial Park, Whittier, CA.

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