Hailing L.A.’s Unheralded First Families : Mormon Couple Are Piecing Together Pedigrees of the City’s Earliest Settlers and Their Descendants

Marie Northrop is a genealogist with a dedication to giving credit where heritage is due. Her husband is Joe Northrop, a seafood broker just as interested in the value of ethnic links as in the price of abalone.

Together, the Eagle Rock couple are building higher recognition for the overlooked settlers of Los Angeles . . . by public marking of their memories and places and anniversaries, by weekend festivals for descendants and by scribing pedigrees for those with little or no idea of their ties to the pobladores (settlers), the soldados (soldiers) and escolta (escort) who set the first plats of the West’s largest and richest megalopolis.

“There are societies for descendants of those who arrived on the Mayflower, for sons and daughters of the American Revolution, even one for Pocahontas,” Marie Northrop said.

In Los Angeles, she knows, there’s a group called the First Century Families. It holds annual meetings to remember the city’s first movers and shakers. The Sepulvedas. The Bannings. The Vails. The landed gentry.

Severely Neglected

But for the pioneer Mexican dirt farmer of 1781, says Mrs. Northrop, for the Spanish soldier, the Indian interpreter, the black servant, the mulattoes and other mixes and now their 10,000 progenies, the neglect has been severe.

Even intentional. For when one’s ancestors are non-white and far from pure Castilian, she says, the preference of prejudiced scions and popular historians is to ignore tangled roots.

“I know some (descendants) who are Quinteros,” Northrop continued, “but they are reluctant to admit it and one went to the grave denying it.” Because, she said, original settler Luis Quintero was black and wife Maria was mulatto. “Yet they were the people who came. These are the people who started Los Angeles. And these are the people I want to focus on because they’re entitled to it.”

With annoyance translating to action, the Northrops are digging deep and often to keep this past from slipping any further.

In 1981 . . . in time for a Los Angeles Bicentennial they felt was ignoring the city’s founding families, the Northrops formed Los Pobladores 200. The target was 200 descendants of the founding 44 (22 adults and 22 children) who migrated from Mexico to colonize Los Angeles in 1781. “To date, we’ve found 250,” said Marie Northrop.

Last year . . . the group held a Memorial Weekend fiesta at Griffith Park with special honorees being the family of Vicente Feliz, the first comisionado of Pueblo de Los Angeles, and a small company of today’s relatives.

And this weekend . . . the Northrops will host their third Tres Dias de Campo (Three Days of Camping) at Whittier Narrows County Recreation Park in South El Monte, site of La Mision Vieja , the original San Gabriel Mission. This year’s honorees will be descendants of the 71 soldiers and settlers who, as part of the 1781 migration, paused at the San Gabriel mission before separating for Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and other areas.

“The response has been a little slow,” said Marie Northrop, “but I have about 10 new ones (descendants) to go with the 250 representing the pobladores and escort soldiers that went on to Pueblo de Los Angeles. “

Organized in conjunction with the Los Angeles City Historical Society and the Associated Historical Societies of Los Angeles County, of which they are members, the Northrops’ three-day encampment will feature genealogical exhibits, music, a book fair, potluck suppers and historical reminiscences around the camp fire.

The Fortunate 71

The backdrop will be the events of more than 200 years ago when Capt. Rivera y Moncada was lieutenant governor of Lower California. Rivera was ordered to escort a party of colonists from Sonora and Sinaloa to existing and proposed pueblos. At the Colorado River, near Yuma, Rivera paused to rest his trail-weary cattle. The colonists, 71 settlers and soldiers, were sent ahead to San Gabriel.

On July 17, 1781, Yuma Indians attacked Rivera’s group as part of an assault on the Colorado River pueblos of San Pablo and Purisima. Rivera and more than four dozen others were killed. But the 71-person expedition to San Gabriel survived.

Mrs. Northrop expects about 140 persons in RVs and tents to attend her commemorative weekend “just to camp together, just to picnic and have fun dancing and listening to music. In a way, it will even duplicate the camaraderie that existed among the original settlers.”

Attaching Personalities

Revealing this local past is important to Northrop. Her research goes beyond a compilation of bare names and cold facts. It extends to attaching personalities to the faceless and full identities to the barely known.

There was Pablo Rodriguez, a farmer, short, stocky, and father of 10 children. But only four would live to maturity. There was Maria Theresa Murillo, who had an affair with one of the soldiers, Capt. Josef Zeniga of the San Diego Presidio. An illegitimate son, Jose Antonio, was born of that tryst. And there was Dona Eulalia Perz, who taught cooking, sewing and weaving at the San Gabriel Mission, became its mayor doma and keeper of the keys and is buried there.

“Yes, they are very real, very meaningful people to me,” said Marie Northrop. They also are a very real reason, she added, why her delving into Los Angeles’ yesterdays might have some benefit for today’s Latino society. “I have a deep concern that the Hispanic people (in Los Angeles) need fortification of their self-esteem and heritage.”

And maybe, she concluded, there would be more security, less individual and community unrest among Latinos “if they had more pride of family, more historical position, a reason to be proud. That’s why I want to bring it (history) out . . . to make it more available.”

Forward and Back

Northrop, 64, finds her detective work challenging, fascinating, frustrating and rewarding. Occasionally the initiative is hers and she will work forward to plug a loophole, taking a name from the past and building its present. Other times, usually at the request of someone who believes but cannot prove their tie to Los Angeles’ first citizens, she will work backward:

“You start with that person, a single name, then go to their mommy and daddy. Then to their grandparents. It’s a step-by-step process. When where you born? Where were you born? But not why were you born? You ask your parents this, you ask your grandparents that, you ask something of every living relative you can find.

“Then you go to documents, the birth, marriage and death certificates. Then the census records in the U.S. Archives at Laguna Niguel. Then there are the genealogical societies . . . and the mission records themselves. They were very detailed, quite accurate.”

Marie Northrop is no high academic riding a professional devotion to shaking family trees via genealogy, heraldry and pedigrees.

The first dedication of her working life was as Joe’s wife, then as mother to their four children. Then their grandchildren.

Mormon Tradition

Yet the Northrops were born Mormon and an important support of that church is its traditional occupation with bloodlines.

So when their children married and there was some time to spare, the Northrops moved forward to the past.

Joe Northrop, 69, is currently president of Los Pobladores 200 and a former president of the Los Angeles City Historical Society. Marie belongs to all the associations and has written two volumes on “Spanish-Mexican Families of Early California: 1769-1850,” published by the Southern California Genealogical Society. In 1983, she delivered a paper on the founding families of Los Angeles to an International Congress of Genealogy and Heraldry in Madrid.

Her interest in drafting pedigrees came from the late Thomas Workman Temple II, California historian, genealogical researcher and archivist at the San Gabriel Mission.

“He used to do early Los Angeles pedigrees for those who asked and before he died in 1972 I told him that I was going to continue his work,” said Marie Northrop. “Two books came from that and although the publications themselves aren’t that sophisticated, at least they’re into print, they’re indexed . . . and that’s my cause.”

Oddly, Mrs. Northrop has not been too lucky in tracing her own bloodlines. Her maiden name was Elsebusch and that tied her to Schleswig-Holstein in Germany in the late 17th Century. But the father’s side of her family was clouded by the events and destruction of World War II and remains buried somewhere in East Germany.

“So I switched efforts and really concentrated on my husband’s pedigree,” she said.

Half of the hunt was far from easy. Joe Northrop’s father left his mother before their son was born in 1918. The only legacy was his name, Merle Northrop.

Yet tracing his mother’s side of the family was textbook, and staggering by its coincidence.

For the lineage of Maria Floresa Murillo tracks to Pablo Rodriguez, Roque Cota, Josef Ontiveros and Segundo Valenzuela and Juan Romero--all members of the 1781 expedition to the San Gabriel Mission.

Then after almost 40 years, Marie Northrop tapped into the paternal bloodline. The Northrops had arrived in California by ox cart from Arkansas and Tennessee. Merle Northrop had been a farmer in Lodi. He died in Salinas in 1966.

“So for Father’s Day last year,” she said, “I was able to tell Joe who his father was.”