Knowing the Family's Story

 

Much has been said for the power of knowing one's own family history, and the resilience it can bestow upon members of subsequent generations. In the case of one local settler eligible for recognition in our county's First Families program, those descendants apparently knew that story well, judging from its repeat appearance in family lore in later generations.

That family represented the descendants of Elias Hildreth, born in Gardiner, Maine, in 1823. A romanticized version of his story appeared in a local history book from 1890, An Illustrated History of San Joaquin County, California. The story of his arrival in California in 1849, according to that biographical sketch, makes it seem as if he had made the six month journey around the Horn by himself. Checking the 1850 census, however, shows a different story: that he, his wife Miranda, and three year old son were then living in Providence, Rhode Island.

An 1867 entry in California's Great Register does show Elias as a registered voter in California, living in O'Neal Township in San Joaquin County at the time, and a brief announcement of the birth of his second son in November of 1865 in the Sacramento Bee confirms his family's residence near that outback territory along the Calaveras River.

No matter how, exactly, the story unfolded, it is clear from tracing the family's line of descent that they knew the history of how their ancestors arrived during the earliest years of San Joaquin County. From a clipping of the obituary of Myrna Hildreth, preserved by reference librarians at the downtown Stockton library, we can read the words her family wanted to share after her 1989 passing at the age of ninety three.

She was born in 1896 at the family home on Hildreth Lane. Her Grandfather came around the Horn on a Sailing Ship to San Francisco in 1849 and settled in the Stockton area in 1852.

Again, another descendant's obituary shared the family story through a transcription of a more recent obituary from 2013, posted at Ancestry.com:

His great-grandfather, Elias Hildreth, for whom Hildreth Lane is named, came to this area in the mid 1850s from Rhode Island.

Indeed, Hildreth Lane could have marked one border of Elias Hildreth's original farm of 354 acres—and if not, possibly the ranch he bought subsequently, containing another 240 acres five miles to the northeast of Stockton. Whether the residents of the tree-shaded street now know anything about the man for whom the road was named, I can't tell—but I certainly wanted to know more about the person the street was meant to acknowledge. As I've come to find out, there are several other streets here which owe their name to someone whom we can recognize as First Families of our county.