Nancy Margaret McDonald

Nancy Margaret McDonald, eldest daughter of Phoebe Ann Branson and William McDonald, was born 6 August 1876 in Merced, Merced County, CA. Her first name probably was given to her to honor her aunt Nancy Anna Branson. Her middle name was probably in honor of her aunt Margaret McDonald. (Note: her birth month is subject to confirmation. A conflicting but perhaps reliable source has it as April, not August.)

Nancy’s childhood was affected by the ill health of her mother, who died when Nancy was only eleven. By 1880 Phoebe was already needing help to care for her four offspring -- the 1880 census shows live-in nanny Mary Jane Geary in the household. (Mary Jane Geary was the sister of Nancy’s aunt Ella Geary, the wife of Phoebe’s brother Joseph Branson.) It is thought that later in the 1880s Nancy’s aunt Theresa Branson cared for the McDonald children, including the period immediately after their mother’s death. Merced was also the home of two other aunts, Nancy Anna Branson Harrington Napier and Mary Jane Branson Johnson, whose presence comforted young Nancy with the knowledge that family was close at hand. Nancy was in her mid-teens before stepmother Agnes Dunn became part of the household.

Nancy is described in old family correspondence and in a newspaper article as a beautiful girl with a fine contralto singing voice. In her early adulthood, she contracted some sort of serious illness, and was sent to San Francisco for treatment and convalescence. It is not known whether the health problem was dealt with swiftly or slowly, but either way she remained in San Francisco for a period of years. Her slightly younger brother, Billy McDonald, is known to have moved to San Francisco in about 1896. Chances are the presence of a family member made Nancy feel more secure about remaining in the city. It is not known, however, if she and Billy ever shared a residence there. If so, it was only a temporary arrangement in the early part of their sojourn.

Nancy’s health crisis may have been caused by hereditary factors. The line springing from her grandparents Sweden McDonald and Allison Bell was plagued by hereditary haemochromatosis, commonly called iron overload. The presence of the gene can lead to many negative health conditions including liver disease, heart failure, and sterility, and can damage the pancreas enough to trigger diabetes. The disease had already brought a premature end to the lives of Nancy’s grandfather and an uncle, and would do the same to her father, her brothers, and another uncle. Females with the gene are often spared the outward effects, but Nancy may have been one of the rare unlucky ones.

By 1900, Nancy was a lodger in a second-floor flat at 2224 Grove Street, sub-renting a room from Edwin Eugene Ames and his wife Sarah Jane, maiden name Massey. Another apartment on the second floor of 2224 Grove Street was occupied by James Greer Price and his family. James’s first wife, deceased by then of tuberculosis, had been Sarah’s niece, Anna Elizabeth Massey. Still living at home was James and Anna’s eldest son, Roy Ames Price (whose middle name was in honor of his great uncle). Nancy and Roy naturally became better acquainted due to their proximity and the kinship connection between the Ames and Price households. Eventually acquaintance became love. Nancy and Roy were married in a just-the-two-families ceremony Tuesday afternoon, 6 October 1903 at the home of her father and stepmother in Merced. Reverend Hills of the local Episcopal church officiated. The honeymoon was spent in El Monte, CA. By the time she became a bride, Nancy was twenty-seven. She was an old maid by the standards of her era -- the label having become unavoidably attached to her nearly three years earlier upon the marriage of her younger sister Teresa to James Garibaldi.

Roy had been born in Sacramento, CA 9 March 1878 shortly after his parents had come west from Indiana, having earlier been residents of New York. After spending his earliest years in Sacramento, he had lived most of the remainder of the 19th Century in Oakland, Alameda County, CA. The family had relocated to San Francisco in late 1899 or early 1900. Roy was the eldest of four kids, the others all being female. Like Nancy, Roy knew what it was like to lose a mother early. Anna Massey Price had passed away in 1893, when Roy was fifteen.

As newlyweds, Nancy and Roy cleaved close to his father and stepmother, Caroline Geldert Price, in San Francisco. James G. Price was working then as a hardware merchant (though not as an owner), and Roy, whose job description in voter registers is hardware salesman, probably worked at the same store. Over the course of his life to come, Roy would always tend toward white collar jobs, usually directly in retail. He is known to have gone from clerking to being the manager of a hardware store, and over his working life was also a cigar merchant, a clerk in an art supply store, and an accountant.

As one might expect, the great earthquake of 1906 disrupted the family’s circumstances. At least some of the Price clan, including James and Caroline, are known to have taken refuge temporarily in Burlingame, San Mateo County, CA. Nancy and Roy may have been part of this sojourn, but one piece of surviving evidence indicates they sought shelter instead with her family in Merced. The evidence is a postcard sent to Roy’s sister Hazel to Box 44 in Merced 7 July 1906. If Hazel Price was in Merced in the summer of 1906, it must be because she went to stay with her brother and sister-in-law. This indicates Nancy and Roy stayed in Merced for a number of months after the quake and fire, but they did not stay more than a year. Once it became practical to find new dwelling places in San Francisco, all the various Price family members returned. James and Carrie found a place on Page Street. Roy and Nancy’s home was a couple of blocks away on Hayes Street.

In late 1909 or early 1910, Roy (shown at left) asserted his independence. He and Nancy relocated across the bay to Oakland, where they would reside for the rest of their lives. Not all of that stretch was spent in the same dwelling, however. Voter registers show them at three different addresses on Harrison Street up into the 1920s, and then on Fortieth Street during the 1930s and into the 1940s.

As a wife, Nancy does not appear to have ever been employed outside the home. This was true even though she did not have kids to raise. She never became a mother. Again, the culprit may have been hereditary haemochromatosis. Even if the disease did not render her sterile -- it might have -- she may have chosen not to reproduce out of concern she would pass the curse on to another generation.

In part because of their childlessness, and in part because of their presence in the East Bay, the Prices were regular participants of family gatherings in Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda with Nancy’s first cousins George Bertrand Johnson and Alice Bretelle Johnson Fowle and their spouses and children. Bretelle’s daughter Esta Jane Fowle grew up thinking of Nancy as “Aunt Nan,” even while understanding that she was technically a cousin. Bretelle and her offspring were among Nancy’s heirs, acquiring her chinaware and associated cabinetry. Though Roy had nieces, he and Nancy must have felt it was proper to pass such items on to her female blood kin of the next generation. Inasmuch as Nancy had no daughters or nieces, Bretelle was the logical candidate. (As a significant revision of this biography was being crafted in June, 2010, some of those heirlooms were still embellishing Esta Jane’s retirement apartment in Eureka, CA.) Nancy was also able to enjoy the nearby presence of another first cousin, Josephine Harrington McDonald, and her sons and their households. Josephine was not only her first cousin on her mother’s side, but had married Charles Sweden McDonald, first cousin of Nancy on her father’s side. (Charles Sweden McDonald and his son Robert Seafield McDonald can be counted among the McDonald kinfolk whose lives were cut short by the effects of hereditary haemochromatosis.)

Nancy died 2 March 1940 at home in Oakland -- an abbreviated life, like most of the McDonalds. Roy died 12 February 1942 of a cerebral hemorrhage at Highland Hospital in Oakland. The remains of both wife and husband were interred in the McDonald plot in the Knights of Pythias Cemetery, one of several adjacent graveyards that now collectively form the Merced Cemetery District. This is where the resting places of Nancy’s parents, stepmother, siblings John and Billy, and half-brother Ellsworth McDonald (born after she had grown up and moved away from Merced) can also be found.

Click here to go to the page devoted to Nancy’s aunt Nancy Anna Branson. At the bottom of that page, Roy and Nancy are among the individuals shown at a family gathering held in 1936 in Woodland, CA.

To go back one generation, click here. To return to the Branson/Ousley Family main page, click here.