Misión Vieja and the 1836 Los Angeles District Census

There were two censuses of the Los Angeles district taken in the Mexican era. This post focuses on the first, taken in 1836, and the counting of those persons who were likely residing in the Misión Vieja area some sixty years after the Mission San Gabriel left that Whittier Narrows location and moved to its current site.

The problem in identifying a specific Old Mission location in the census is that the place name Misión Vieja was not used. Rather, "Rancho Santa Gertrudes" was employed. This was the name of one of the several ranchos carved out of the enormous Nieto land grant, which was one of the first private land grants issued under Spanish rule back in 1784. Santa Gertrudes was in the area now including Downey, a corner of Bellflower, southern Pico Rivera, northern Norwalk, parts of Whittier (including unincorporated Los Angeles County areas with Whittier zip codes) and much of Santa Fe Springs. In fact, the name "Los Nietos" was utilized for most of this area as a township when the American period began and a community within Santa Fe Springs retains this moniker.

The first listed name in the 1836 census in Rancho Santa Gertrudes was Juan [Crispín] Perez, son of Juan Crispín Perez Nieto, who was the original co-owner of that rancho with his brother Manuel Perez Nieto.

After Perez and his family, including wife Tomasa Ontiveros, there is Jacinto Alvitre and his wife Maria Lugarda Moreno. Alvitre was the son of one of the first soldados del cuero (leatherjacket soldiers) of the Spanish settlement of California, Sebastian Alvitre and his wife Maria Rufina Hernandez. The Alvitre family would live in the Misión Vieja area for well over a century.

One of the daughters of Jacinto and Lugarda, Maria Buenaventura, was living next to her parents along with husband, Antonio Bermudez ("Mermudes" in the census) and daughter, Petra. His mother, Ana Maria Lugo, was listed further down the census (see below.)

Later down the list was Jacinto's brother, Juan, and his wife Tomasa Alvarado and their eight children. Among their offspring was Felipe, only a year old in this census, and who had a dramatic and untimely end (more on that later!) Also present was another brother, Antonio, and his wife Maria Concepción Amesquita and their five children. Antonio would, by the mid-1840s, leave the Los Angeles area and move to Monterey in the north.

Also present was another Alvitre brother, Jose Claudio, and his wife Asención Valenzuela, daughter of another soldado del cuero and their four children. More on the tragic story of Jose Claudio and Asención in a later post!

With all of these Alvitre brothers, there were also sisters! Maria Dominga and her husband Antonio Valenzuela resided near Jose Claudio. The couple had four children and were later grantees with Dominga's brother, Juan Jose, of the Rancho Potrero Chico or Misión Vieja. Jose Antonio Valenzuela's father, Jose Manuel, was another leatherjacket who enlisted in his hometown of Villa de Sinaloa, Sinaloa, Mexico for a 1781 expedition to Mission San Gabriel.

Next was another longtime Misión Vieja family, the Duartes, represented by Manuel Duarte and wife Polinara Ontiveros, sister of the Tomasa married to Juan Crispín Perez. A couple of households away was Manuel's brother, Nasario and his wife, Maria Silva, and their son. The Duartes were sons of Sonora, Mexico native Juan Jose Duarte and Maria Gertrudes Guadalupe Moreno.

After this was Cecilio Lobo [Jose Cecilio Villalobo] from Santa Barbara and his wife Maria Casilda Soto along with their five children. More on them in subsequent posts!

Another early family was that of Urbino Tapia and wife Mariana Lorenzana. Tapia was from San Jose in northern California and his wife was an orphan from Mexico City who came with eighteen other children who adopted the name of Bishop Lorenzana, who ran the orphanage there.

Also present were several New Mexicans, including Julián Vargas, Juan Vigil, Jesus Maria Herrera, Jesus Maria Rivera and Jesus Perez, who may have been on some of the trading caravans that traveled the "Old Spanish Trail," which was opened from Santa Fe to Los Angeles in 1829.

Romero is the name of another long-associated Misión Vieja family and rancher Manuel Romero, native of Santa Barbara, and his wife Gregoria Ontiveros, sister of the Tomasa and Apolinaria mentioned above. The Romeros had four children present in the household.

Another notable resident was Ana Maria Lugo, widow of Juan Hilario Bermudez. A native of San Buenaventura Mission (Ventura), she married Bermudez, who hailed from Sonora, Mexico and came as a child of six to San Gabriel. He was in the military and was stationed at Santa Barbara, where he probably met Ana Maria, and later at San Gabriel. The couple had eight children, six living to adulthood, but Hilario was killed after being thrown from his horse somewhere in the Rancho Santa Gertudes area. As for his widow, she went on to become the mayordomo (overseer) at the Mission San Gabriel during the Mexican-American War.

An interesting resident of the area was Maria del Rosario Guillen, who was the daughter of the famed Eulalia Perez de Guillen, long time keeper of the keys (llavelera) at Mission San Gabriel, and who was said to be over 140 years old at her death in the 1870s. Though this was, of course, inaccurate, she was undoubtedly over a century old. Rosario was the youngest child of Eulalia and married Michael White, a British sailor who came to Los Angeles in the 1831. By the time of the census, however, White was in New Mexico conducting a trading business and left his young wife and two children, Jose and Juana. White, known as Miguel Blanco, later built an adobe near the San Gabriel Mission that still stands on the grounds of San Marino High School, though it has been earmarked for demolition.

George Morrillo and Magdalena Vejar were other long-time residents of Misión Vieja. Morrillo, a native of the Baja California mission town of Loreto, was the second husband of Vejar, whose brother, Ricardo, was then raising cattle on Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas (today's Beverly Hills) but who was granted (with Ygnacio Palomares) the following year the Rancho San José in what is now the Pomona area. Magdalena was previously married to Jose Joaquin Verdugo, of the family that received the second Los Angeles area land grant in the Glendale and surrounding region, but he had died in the early 1830s. Morrillo received a land grant to Rancho Potrero de Felipe Lugo (Lugo was a son of noted ranchero Antonio Maria Lugo and a judge of the plains handling ranching issues) in the mid-1840s.

Morrillo's co-owner of the Potrero de Felipe Lugo was Teodoro Romero, who married Magdalena Vejar and Jose Joaquin Verdugo's daughter, Juana Maria.

There were other residents of the Rancho Santa Gertrudes area, but those listed here, including the families of Alvitre, Bermudez, Duarte, Valenzuela, lived in the Misión Vieja community for decade upon decade.

The next post will examine the 1844 census.

Information for this post, including the scan of the page that shows the first "Rancho Santa Gertrudes" listings, came from the reprint of the 1836 census published in the Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly, 1936.

Contributed by Paul R. Spitzzeri.