by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This coming Sunday, after a postponement from January due to illness, the Homestead presents an illustrated talk on “The Lost Community of Misión Vieja/Old Mission,” concerning a longstanding settlement in what could be considered the cradle of our region’s human history, the Whittier Narrows, in which the San Gabriel River cut a channel through a hill range now divided into the Montebello and Puente segments.
After the Mission San Gabriel was founded on the west bank of that watercourse, now the Río Hondo, but then moved because of flooding to higher, dryer ground in its current location, the Old Mission community later emerged. During the late Mexican era, the settlement included a cadre of families, including those with the surnames of Alvitre, Andrade, Barry, Bermudez, Davis, Manzanares, Sánchez, Temple, Valenzuela and others and most of whom were Spanish-speakers from what was known as Alta California as well as northern México.
As with so many small, rural communities, there was a high degree of intermarriage and close ties that meant important close familial relations that carried down through generations. At times, conflict arose, too, involving alcoholism, marital strife, rivalries and, on occasion, violence. It is unlikely that Misión Vieja was any different than other such “country” settlements in Los Angeles County, such as Los Nietos (just south in what is now Downey, Santa Fe Springs and Pico Rivera) San Gabriel, or San Juan Capistrano.
What often takes place in these areas, as well as in more urban communities, are extramarital relationships that yielded children who were known as hijos/hijas natural, born out of wedlock. In a sparsely populated place, however, many of these young ones were raised by a mother, stepfather, grandparents, uncles or aunts or, sometimes, variations of these during childhood. In many cases, descendants may not have been aware of the status of their ancestors until many generations later, especially with the rise of genealogy and the ease of finding information that reveals the realities so often hidden or unheeded in the past. There are more children born out of wedlock than we assume.
A prior post here, for instance, delved into the hija natural background of Laura González Temple, wife of Homestead owner Walter P. Temple. She was an Old Mission native, born in 1871 a short distance (as all community members were) from Walter’s family, to musician Feliz González (who was married to a member of the Alvitre family) and Francisca Valenzuela. Laura was educated in Los Angeles and then employed by Francis W. Temple at the Homestead, where she had a clandestine relationship with Walter when they were in their teens. The couple did not marry until they were in their early thirties, but Laura’s mother, though not publicly recognized as such, lived with the Temples until her death in 1916.
This post concerns another such child connected to the Temple family. A quarter century ago, contact was made with Joseph Romero, Jr., a Pomona Police Department captain, and later chief, who was anxious to know whether handwritten notes by his grandmother, Minnie Pérez Acuña, regarding the parentage of her mother, Zoraida (Ida) Pérez, related to the Homestead’s Temple family. After some research and discussion, it was confirmed that Zoraida was the daughter of Thomas W. Temple, eldest child of Margarita Workman and F.P.F. Temple, in an out-of-wedlock relationship.
I well remember how emotional it was for Capt. Romero to make that connection and it was a reminder of how what we do can be meaningful in connecting people with their past. This was reinforced last week when another descendant, Francisco Pérez, got in touch and then visited the Museum on Friday and established his own connection and tie to his Temple heritage. While there isn’t a great deal of information available about Ida Temple Pérez, it is good to give her due recognition as a member of the Temple family and part of the Homestead’s history.
Thomas W. Temple, the eldest of eleven children, eight of whom lived to adulthood, was born in November 1846, just as the Mexican-American War in California was within several weeks of ending with the second seizure of Los Angeles by United States forces. His father, F.P.F., was a native of Massachusetts who settled in the pueblo about five years prior and worked at his brother Jonathan’s store, the first in town. His mother, Margarita, who hailed from Taos, New Mexico, also came to this region in 1841 and settled with her parents, British native William Workman and Taos-born Nicolasa Urioste, on Rancho La Puente.
When Thomas was four years old, his parents moved to the adjacent Rancho La Merced, which William Workman acquired in 1850 by foreclosure on a loan made to its grantee, Casilda Soto de Lobo, and then deed in halves to the Temple and to his former La Puente foreman Juan Matias Sánchez. He received some of his early education at the private school conducted at the Workman House and then lived with his parents in Misión Vieja on their extensive estate that stood out from the other residences in that farming and ranching community.
He was eighteen years old when he had a liaison with Petra Bermudez, who was about a half-dozen years older. She was born in 1840 to José Antonio Bermudez and Buenaventura Alvitre, the former descended from two generations of Bermudez family in Alta California as well as from the well-known Lugo family, while the latter was the granddaughter of Sebastián Alvitre and Rufina Hernández through their son Juan José and his wife Tomasa Alvarado (from another prominent name in California history.) Petra was previously married to Diego Silvas and had three children with him between 1856 and 1861.
It is not known whether the 24-year old widow and her 18-year old paramour had a relationship or not, but, on 26 February 1866 Petra gave birth to Guadalupe Zoraida. Notably, not quite two months earlier, on New Year’s Day, Thomas was married to Refugia Martinez, who was connected to Sánchez and had ancestry from New Mexico. Refugia, however, died in 1869, perhaps in childbirth. By then, Thomas was residing in Los Angeles, having gone into business as the junior partner of a tinware company, though as the region was in the early stages of its first boom, his fortunes were to rise greatly in the next several years.
The Temple family had long been among the elite of Los Angeles County and, as briefly noted above, lived in level of luxury and wealth far above and beyond their Old Mission neighbors. Thomas, clearly groomed to succeed his father in business, including the family’s bank of Temple and Workman, was also something of a social butterfly. Leaving the tinware business to become a cashier at the bank, he built a substantial home at Main and Third streets, in what was then the fashionable residential district of the small, but growing, city. Known as “Lord Chesterfield” for his fine dress, impeccable manners, and genial personality, Thomas climbed the financial and social ladders of town with rapidity, including as a founding trustee, in 1872, of the Los Angeles Public Library.
His rise to prominence, however, was abruptly and brutally halted with the collapse of the Temple and Workman bank in early 1876 and the revelation, through an inventory of assets and liabilities, that Thomas had tens of thousands of dollars of the latter to his name. Obviously, the idea that an employee who was also the son of the founding president was in such significant debt was no small controversy and one result of the debacle was the May suicide of his grandfather William Workman. Under two weeks later, Thomas married Jeanette (Nettie) Friend, who was a niece of prominent Los Angeles businessman Wallace Woodworth.
While the couple remained in Los Angeles for about two years after the bank’s demise, Thomas was unlikely to return to any business capacity and, accepting the gift of some land held by his mother and, therefore, not subject to the mortgage of Temple lands used as collateral for a loan made by Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin to the stricken institution, he moved to the Rancho Potrero de Felipe Lugo, in the northeast section of Misión Vieja. This was the near the larger ranch of his younger brother, John, and Thomas built an eight-room house for he and Nettie to reside in as he tried his hand at farming.
This endeavor, however, was not successful. In fall 1880, Thomas declared bankruptcy and an assignee was appointed to oversee the sale of his property to pay back creditors. The last of these sales was made towards the end of the following year to Richard Garvey, a former agent of Baldwin who amassed quite a landholding portfolio out of former Temple (and Sánchez, who, tragically, was forced to put up his property on La Merced, for the Baldwin loan) lands. Early in 1882, Thomas, Nettie and their baby boy, whose name has not yet been learned and who was Zoraida’s half-brother, left for Hermosillo, Sonora in northern México, though there were also periods spent at the Arizona border city of Tucson.
Thomas apparently hoped to get back into banking, as well as move into real estate, in Hermosillo, but wound up running a card parlor as he struggled to support himself and his family. At an unknown date, the young child died and the stricken parents, likely also in continuing financial difficulties, returned to Los Angeles in 1885. Thomas established a partnership with Reginaldo F. del Valle, who was from a prominent family and became a significant political figure in later years, in the California and Mexican Land and Information Bureau, which hoped to develop large tracts of land in Sonora.
After a couple of years in this endeavor, Thomas then took over, apparently in foreclosure of a loan to the proprietor, Simon A. Cardona, the long-standing Spanish-language newspaper, La Crónica, which was founded in the early 1870s. Perhaps because of his preceding bankruptcy, Thomas assigned the ownership to Nettie while referring to himself as the editor and manager of the publication. While greater Los Angeles went through a greater Boom of the Eighties, which occurred largely during the mayoral administration of Temple’s cousin, William H. Workman, the ensuing bust meant hard times for many.
About that time, Zoraida married. Her mother was wedded in the late 1860s to Juan Mora and, while the young girl has not yet been located in the 1870 census, she appears in the 1880 enumeration as 15-year old Guadalupe Silvas in the Mora household. It is not known how much, if any, formal education she had. In February 1889, she went to the altar with José Pérez, who was raised in San Gabriel and the Los Angeles Herald of the 17th briefly observed that “Soraida Temple” tied the knot with Pérez, the nuptial occurring at the Mission San Gabriel.
He had ancestry including some prominent Californio families, with his father Teodosio born on the Rancho San Antonio of the Lugo family, his grandmother being Maria Vicenta Lugo, daughter of the ranch’s owner, Antonio María. His mother was María Vejar, who was born on the Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas (now the Beverly Hills area and which was partially owned in the 1860s by William Workman) where her father, Ricardo, raised livestock until he and partner Ygnacio Palomares were able to secure a land grant to the Rancho San José in what is now Pomona, Claremont and surrounding areas.
In fact, the Pérez family settled in the Pomona area, though the Vejar portion of Rancho San José (the abajo, or lower, half) had passed, during the dire years of flood and drought in the 1860s, to Louis Phillips. As the Vejars moved to property on the adjoining Rancho Los Nogales, José and Zoraida took up residence on some acres on the east (south) side of Valley Boulevard near where Lanterman State Hospital long operated and what is now the south campus of Cal Poly Pomona. The couple had four children that lived into adulthood, the eldest being Minnie, and, in later years, moved into the city of Pomona.
Notably, when Ida’s mother, Petra, died in 1927, there were claims that she was 122 years old, this based on a reading of the hard-to-read baptismal records from the Spanish era of California that transposed numbers, so that it was supposed that she underwent that Roman Catholic Church sacrament in 1804, instead of 1840—not to mention that she would have been 61 years old when Zoraida was born! While the news of her alleged advanced age was spread throughout the country, her actual age of at least 87 years old—she does appear to be enumerated in the 1836 census during the Mexican period as being two years old, which would have made her 93 at death and suggests her baptism was delayed—was certainly an advanced age regardless.
Ida passed away at age 65 in November 1930 and the Pomona Progress Bulletin noted pointedly that “Mrs. Perez was a daughter of Thomas Temple” and didn’t mention Petra, although it did state that she died three years prior at over a century. The reference to her father, who died in early 1892 during a flu epidemic that took the lives of his mother and grandmother during a three-week period, appears to be the only such public occurrence. It doesn’t look like much was said about it in the family until Capt. Pérez brought his grandmother’s notes to confirm the connection.
There are many stories of interest and instructiveness that will be shared at next Sunday’s presentation on the history of Misión Vieja/Old Mission, so, if this whets your appetite, please join us then!
Another notable community in the U.S. with a significant number of children born out of wedlock could be black females during the plantation period. It seems that the lack of documentation, the forced disruption of their families, and frequent buying and selling of slaves during that era make their descendants extremely difficult, unlike Ruth Ann Temple Michelins and Joseph Romero, Jr., to trace their lineage or the history of their ancestors.