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Later Lives

The Davis Children

Thelma Adelaide Davis became a librarian, and from 1943 she was Director of the Clementon Memorial Library. She married Arthur C. Ralston (1914 to 1967) and was widowed at about 55. She had two daughters; one of them, Gladys, who married a Carlson, died before her mother. Thelma died on 26 February 2015, aged 103, and her family asked that memorial gifts go to Mooseheart, the home that had raised her.

Among the family’s papers is a tribute speech, handwritten in a second hand, apparently given at a birthday gathering for a grandmother just after “a quick timeline of her life” had been read out. A note names the writer as “Merle’s daughter, Kathy Simpkins”. The speech does not name its subject. Since Thelma’s children were Merle and Gladys, a writer who was Merle’s daughter was Thelma’s granddaughter, and the subject was probably Thelma. Her girlhood in a children’s home fits the Davis sisters’ years at Mooseheart. The speech opens with Hebrews 13:5, “Be content with such things as ye have, for I will never leave you, nor forsake you,” as the theme of her life. It tells of the years she spent as a girl in “a children’s home (a kind of orphanage)”; of leaving school young to work “as a cleaning woman and a servant for a family,” of whom she would only say, “They were very good to me”; of how “she lost her husband, my grandfather, at an early age”; and of a memory she treasured above any fine house or fur coat: David giving her “her very 1st compact of face powder”.

Winifred Anne Davis probably went west. A Winifred Ann Sharp, born on 8 February 1914, her exact birth date, died at San Jose, California, on 11 August 2006. A Winifred A. Davis married Finis S. Sharp in Douglas County, Nevada, on 4 August 1970, and Finis Spencer Sharp (29 May 1914 to 12 February 1990) died in Santa Clara County, California. The match rests on her name and birth date. Whether she had married before 1970 is not known.

Pearl’s Branchide Half-Brothers and Half-Sister

Clifford Harold Branchide married Emma Marie Capper on 16 September 1924. He was then a beamer in a textile mill, living at 1357 Dyre Street. Emma Marie was the daughter of Walter Capper, a merchant born in Philadelphia, and Annie Hallowell, born in England. In 1940 they lived in Philadelphia’s 35th Ward with their daughter, Nancy (1929 to 1991, later Brombach), and Clifford worked as a filling-station attendant. Emma Marie is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery, Huntingdon Valley. On 4 October 1943 Clifford and Lillian F. Moll applied for a marriage license in Bucks County, and they probably married that year. By 1950 he lived at Bensalem with Lillian and kept his own business as a storekeeper and garage attendant. He died in 1962. He and Lillian M. (1910 to 1988) are buried at Saint Peter’s Union Cemetery, Hilltown Township, Bucks County.

A Walter Branchide, 24, single, an assistant motorman at Buck Mountain mine no. 6 in Schuylkill County, was squeezed between a car and the dumper on 8 January 1929 and hurt, though not fatally. The surname, the county and the work all fit Walter, though the age is two years short, and he is probably the man. In 1940 Walter ran his own gas station, fifty hours a week, and in 1950 he sold auto supplies. He married Margaret Adeline Duffield, who died in 1969. Walter died on 8 July 1973, and they are buried at Eglington Cemetery, Clarksboro, New Jersey.

Living family members are not shown.

Kay Walter and Wayne Thomas are buried at Washington Crossing National Cemetery.

William Burton Branchide married Rita, born in February 1917. In 1940 and 1950 they lived in Philadelphia’s 33rd Ward, in the household of his uncle Jacob Branchide, with their son, born about 1938, and two infants.

Living family members are not shown.

William Burton became the editor of the Northeast and Mayfair News; the Mayfair News was one of the five papers of News Gleaner Publications in Northeast Philadelphia. A clipping from the paper shows S/Sgt. H. F. Haserick, the local Army recruiter, presenting a Certificate of Appreciation from the U.S. Army Recruiting Service to “Mr. William Branchide, editor,” for the paper’s support of recruiting. Rita died in January 1968, and William Burton died on Tuesday, 26 March 1968, at the Neshaminy Manor Center in Bucks County, after a long illness. His paper’s obituary, “William Branchide, Editor, Dies At Age 61,” reads in part:

“Funeral services will be held Saturday morning at 10:30 A. M. from the Fluehr Funeral Home, [3301 or 8801] Cottman avenue (Cottman and Rowland avenues) with Interment in the Hillside Cemetery. … His wife Rita passed away in January. Mr. Branchide is survived by two sons and a daughter [names withheld]. Also five grandchildren, a brother and two sisters”.

The brother and two sisters were Walter, Verda and his half-sister Pearl; Clifford had died in 1962. The family understood the obituary to belong to a Branchide household apart from Harriet’s, and it does: William Burton was Pearl’s half-brother, not her father. He was buried at Hillside Cemetery and Memorial Gardens, Roslyn, where his grandmother, Mary Houser Branchide, already lay. George Washington Wesemann is buried there too, and Elmer and Pearl were later laid in the same ground (see George and Fredericka's Family, 1860 to 1907).

A Branchide family of Newportville, Bensalem and Croydon, in Bucks County, descends from William Burton. The 2019 obituary of Robert M. (“Bobby”) Branchide (1971 to 2019) of Newportville, born at Bristol, names his late mother as Wilhelmina (Kirkwood) Branchide, and his father and a brother, who are living. He was buried from the Tomlinson Funeral Home, Bensalem, at Resurrection Cemetery, Bensalem. His father is probably the son born about 1938 to William Burton and Rita, in the 1940 and 1950 censuses; the generation and the place agree, but no single record names all three generations. If so, Bobby was Pearl’s half-great-nephew.

Verda B. Branchide was not quite three when Lucinda died. In 1930 she lived at Mahanoy City as the niece of Martin and Carrie G. Roberts; Martin was a coal-mine laborer, born in Wales, who had come over in 1885. Carrie was probably Carrie Gertrude Myers, Lucinda’s sister. Martin Roberts married Carrie Myers in Schuylkill County on 21 June 1897. The delayed birth record of their son Gilbert Harold, born at Vulcan on 17 August 1904, names his mother as Carrie Gertrude Myers. In 1880 a Carrie, 6, lived with Michael and Mary Meyers at Laurytown, with Lucy, 9, and Maud, 3. Carrie does not appear among the Myers sisters on her parents’ memorials, which are incomplete.

In 1940 Verda lived in Elk Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey, as the niece of Robert J. Newton, 65, a farm laborer, and his wife, Maude, 61. She molded caps, thirty-seven hours a week for forty weeks of the year. Maude Newton was probably Maude D. Ullrich, the daughter of Moses Ullrich and Margaret J., and not a Myers sister. Robert Newton, 32, born at Hazleton, the son of Richard Newton and Jane Howard, married Maude Ullrich, 27, also born at Hazleton, in Manhattan on 2 September 1906. Robert J. and Maude D. Newton lived in Philadelphia in 1910 and 1920 and in Gloucester County in 1940 and 1950, and Robert died there in April 1959. How Verda came to be the Newtons’ niece is not known.

By 1950 Verda was married to Fred E. Kralish, born about 1908 in Austria, who had his own business in the automobile trade at Paulsboro, New Jersey. They had a daughter, born about 1946, and Fred’s unmarried sister Ella, 30, born in New Jersey, lived with them. Verda died in Gloucester County on 25 August 2004 and is buried at Clarksboro. She is the Verda Kralish whom Pearl’s family records and obituary name as Pearl’s sister.