Teresa McDonald

Teresa McDonald, the youngest daughter and youngest of the four children of Phoebe Ann Branson and William McDonald, was born 21 February 1880 in Merced, Merced County, CA. She was probably named for her aunt, Theresa Branson. However, there is no absolute clarity on the spelling of her name. On this website, the “Th” spelling is used for the aunt, and the “Te” spelling used for the niece. However, references to either woman show them under either spelling -- Theresa Branson even signed her name both ways. In Teresa McDonald's case, she appears under the “Th” spelling in the 1880 and 1900 censuses and in four different family obituaries including her own. Therefore when this website first went live, the “Th” spelling was also used here. However, most other documentation has the “Te” spelling, among them the photograph shown below right. (Look closely near the bottom of the image.) More to the point, “Teresa” is how it is spelled in a dozen voter registers. Inasmuch as the woman herself must have filled out her voter application, she apparently preferred to be known as Teresa. Therefore that spelling is now reflected on this website, a policy change made in May, 2009. You will note the lack of a middle name. Any middle name she had at birth is unknown, though she is likely to have had one. In married life, she used McDonald as a middle name.

Teresa’s mother died when she was only seven and may have been in ill health from the time of Teresa’s birth onward. The 1880 census shows the McDonald household even at that early stage resorting to extra household help in the person of Phoebe’s eighteen-year-old sister-in-law Mary Jane Geary. Later in the 1880s Phoebe’s sister Theresa Branson moved to Merced and it is thought she cared for her namesake and the other McDonald children, a duty that may have covered the early period following Phoebe’s death.

In 1892 William McDonald Sr. married Agnes Dunn, who became the children’s stepmother. Despite the disruption of Phoebe’s premature death, the McDonald family remained securely established in Merced throughout Teresa’s childhood. In adulthood she kept to this pattern, marrying local boy James Joseph Garibaldi, with whom she would spend the rest of her long life without ever moving out of the community. James (Jimmy) was one of the many children of Italian immigrants Katherine (Kate) Commissi and Giacomo Garibaldi. By the time Teresa and Jimmy married, his mother had been deceased for a number of years, so the experience of losing a mother was something the young couple had in common. Giacomo (often better known simply as G. Garibaldi) was still alive, though. He was a grocer who, along with William McDonald and others, had helped to found Merced after Central Pacific Railroad had initiated the community in 1872. Giacomo had moved his business to Merced from Hornitos, where he had been acquainted with the Bransons. Giacomo had originally come to California during his childhood, originating from Genoa, Italy.

The wedding took place at the home of William and Agnes McDonald on Eighteenth Street on Tuesday evening, 5 February 1901, Rev. Father McNamara officiating. After a honeymoon in San Francisco, the couple established their own home in Merced.

Jimmy, born 30 April 1876, had attended the University of California at Santa Clara before the marriage. His “educated” status gave him a greater variety of career choices than was typical in Merced, a relatively pastoral Central Valley town, and he took advantage of those choices. At first, he worked at (and was a shareholder of) his father’s grocery store, Olcese & Garibaldi. Within just a few years, he became a co-owner and operator of that legacy business along with his elder brother John B. Garibaldi. It is quite likely that Teresa helped at the store, especially in the period before the arrival of the couple’s only child, James Donald Garibaldi, in July, 1906.

One child seems like a small family, but in fact, Teresa was unique among her siblings in having any offspring at all. William McDonald sired a total of six children -- the fifth being a baby he and Agnes lost in the early 1890s, and the sixth being Maurice Ellsworth McDonald, born in 1902 and therefore someone who never shared a household with Teresa -- yet Teresa was the only one of the six who would present the patriarch with a grandchild. Presumably, it was Teresa and Jimmy’s choice to have so few. They may have been influenced by the knowledge of a negative health trait carried down from her grandfather Sweden McDonald. The McDonalds were carriers of the gene that causes hereditary haemochromatosis. This metabolic disorder 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 may well have been what caused Sweden McDonald to die in his early forties. It had done the same to his son Robert Seafield McDonald and probably to Robert’s son William E. McDonald, and would go on to shorten the lives of Teresa’s father, all of her siblings, her uncle Thomas Hayes McDonald, and a number of cousins. Though females are often spared the effects of the presence of the gene, Teresa had every reason to assume she was a carrier and she may have been reluctant to pass the curse on to her offspring. Ironically, Teresa may have been the one member of the immediate family who did not inherit the trait. She and her son both lived well into their eighties. Had she been able to predict this outcome, it is a guess whether she would have decided to have a “big Italian family” with Jimmy. As it was, Teresa was quick to fill her time being actively involved with Jimmy’s businesses -- in a support role, but definitely not as part of a stay-at-home housewife scenario.

Merced was home to a large contingent of the Branson clan for thirty years, beginning in the mid-1870s. It was where the offspring of Phoebe, Nancy, and Mary Jane Branson grew up. However, Teresa McDonald Garibaldi was the one representative of the clan who stayed for the next sixty years as well. One effect of the isolation was that her husband’s family became the one she cleaved to in the latter portion of her life. However, when various Bransons, McDonalds, or other kin on her mother’s side did visit Merced, it was often to Teresa’s home they came. (A major alternative was the home of her stepmother, at least until Agnes’s death in 1947.)

At some point near the time of Donald’s birth, Jimmy (shown at left) sold his share in the grocery store. With partner William Howell, Jimmy and Teresa owned and operated the Central Hotel. This went on until 1913. Jimmy retired from hotel management upon being appointed county tax collector, a job to which he was reelected many times. He served twenty-one years total. And just as she had been a part of the hotel business, Teresa was part of the new job as well. She was for years on the county payroll as assistant tax collector. Eventually the arrangement came to be viewed as inappropriate, in part because it was not unique. In July, 1933, Merced County District Attorney General Frank M. Ostrander announced that it was illegal for county officials’ wives to work with their husbands as paid county employees. (This concern for ethics about matters of nepotism is interesting, given that Ostrander might never have become the D.A. had his father, Frank M. Ostrander, Sr., not served in that role in the 1880s.) As soon as Ostrander made his announcement, the wife of the county sheriff resigned her post of jail matron, and the wife of the county auditor resigned her post of assistant auditor.

Teresa refused to resign. She declared she would only leave her job if a judge made a ruling that confirmed Ostrander’s policy as correct. But the controversy surely became a key part of Jimmy’s decision not to seek reelection in 1934. This had an unexpected side benefit -- this perhaps being an extra motive for Jimmy not to put his name in. Teresa and Jimmy’s baby boy Donald was now a grown man and a lawyer with the Merced firm headed by C. Ray Robinson. The latter individual had decided not to run for another term as state assemblyman from the Merced district, and had urged Donald to take his place. Donald did so. Voters saw Donald’s name on the ballot as James D. Garibaldi and it reminded them of the James J. Garibaldi they had voted for in so many previous elections. Don had no trouble winning the election.

Jimmy went on to become a fire marshall and by the late 1930s, acting fire chief. In early February, 1939, he was appointed Merced City Clerk, replacing Winslow T. Clough, who had recently passed away. In stepping into the new job, Jimmy was in a way carrying on a family tradition. In the early years of the 20th Century, Teresa’s uncle William Osborne Moore had held the very same position.

Teresa and her husband lived out their twilight years quietly in Merced. Their son went on to become a superior court judge and then one of the most powerful lobbyists in the entire history of California government. Both Teresa and Jimmy enjoyed long lives. Among her birth family, Teresa was the only one to make it past age seventy. She went on to be eighty-five. She passed away 27 August 1965 at a hospital in Merced. Jimmy made it to age ninety, finally expiring 16 April 1967.

The remains of both spouses were entombed in the Evergreen Mausoleum in Merced. (Teresa’s plaque is shown at right.) That choice of resting place deserves comment, because Teresa’s parents, stepmother, siblings, and brother-in-law Roy Ames Price were all interred in the Merced city cemetery, as was Jimmy’s mother.

Child of Teresa McDonald with James Joseph Garibaldi

James Donald Garibaldi

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