The Turners

This post is about the ancestors of Adeline Martha Mann's husband, Clarence Helmer Turner.  They're an interesting bunch.

Clarence's paternal grandparents were Rev. John Turner, a Baptist minister, and Mary Ellis.  They had fifteen children, one being Jesse Foote Turner, Clarence's father.  Also of interest here are Jesse's brothers Milo H. and Peter Helmer.

Jesse was born in New York, and throughout his life he had various occupations, including merchant, attorney, and river boat pilot on the Erie Canal.  He married Eleanor "Ellen" DeGarmo, who supposedly was a cook on the boat he was piloting.  They had at least the following children: Clarence Helmer, Frances C. (died young), Gertrude (died young), Frances "Frankie" (adopted), and Charles H. (died young).

 Ellen (DeGarmo) Turner and Jesse Foote Turner

Jesse and various of his siblings moved to Michigan, where Jesse and Milo worked closely together on various business ventures.  Jesse studied law in Michigan, and became a county judge.  In 1952, Jesse and Milo and their families, along with the widow of their brother Samuel and her children, and Ellen's brother John DeGarmo [check -- did he come at the same time?] moved to California by wagon train.  They were followed some time later by brother William and his family.  At first Jesse's family lived in Placerville, where Jesse held various local political offices, then in Ione near Jackson.  In 1863 he became county judge and they moved to Jackson.  Throughout this time he and Milo continued to work closely together. 

In 1864 the oldest son Clarence married Adeline Martha Mann.  Jessie died in 1871 at age 60.  Clarence and Adeline, Milo and his family, and Ellen all moved to the Bay Area, though not all at the same time.  Milo ended up as a justice of the peace in Walnut Creek, by 1880.  Ellen remarried to Thomas S. Phillips in 1878, but he also predeceased her.  In her later years she lived with Adeline and Clarence at their boarding house.  She died in 1903.

Adeline Toye Cox, granddaughter of Clarence, says in her oral history:

My mother's grandmother's maiden name was Ellen De Garmo, and she couldn t read or write. When she married [Jesse Foote] Turner, who later was a judge in Jackson, the story is that she told him if she was good enough to marry him when she couldn't read or write, why, she was good enough still so she never learned.  It apparently was a problem in her later days, because she -- then a widow -- lived in Berkeley with her son and daughter-in-law, and then the son died, and my grandmother had the boarding house for students. Ellen De Garmo couldn t fill in her time. She couldn't read or write, and she was too old to be trusted with some of the kitchen and cooking and so on, and I ve been told that it
was very difficult for her because she d been a hard worker all her life, and here she was, an appendage.

So why is Jesse's brother Peter Helmer Turner of interest?  Although he stayed in the midwest, his granddaughter Jessie Skinner married Jesse Foote Turner's grandson William DeGarmo Turner.  So William, like his youngest brother Wallace, married a second cousin (on their father's side in William's case, on their mother's side in Wallace's case).

More to follow -- this post is still very incomplete!