Casa Captivating
In 1637, two brothers from Bedfordshire, England arrived in Rhode Island where they settled and raised families. Their names were George and Thomas Lawton.
Their families remained in Rhode Island for several generations. In the 1760s,Thomas’s great-great-granddaughter moved west to Pennsylvania, then Ohio. Subsequent generations of Thomas Lawton’s descendants moved west to Iowa, then settled in Kansas.
In 1878, Nellie Maud Gail was born to Thomas Lawton’s great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter Prudence Stoneman Gail, who was living in Kansas.
In the mid 1800s, George’s descendants also moved west. His great-great-great-granddaughter Sarah Rose settled in Minnesota, where she gave birth to a son, Oscar.
Oscar Rose settled his own family in Racine, Wisconsin. He also welcomed a daughter in 1878. The child was named Nellie Mae Rose.
Nellie Mae Rose married Ole Hanson. The couple and their children moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, Washington in 1912, and Ole served as Seattle Mayor from 1917-18. They continued on to Los Angeles, California in the early 1920s. Ole Hanson founded the City of San Clemente and built their bluff-top vacation home (now called Casa Romantica) in 1927.
Nellie Maud Gail immigrated from Kansas to Seattle in the early 1900s to find work as a school teacher. In 1908, she visited her father in El Toro, California, about 40 miles south of Los Angeles, where she met and later married Lewis Moulton, a rancher who owned several thousand acres of land encompassing what are today the cities of Laguna Niguel and Aliso Viejo.
No one knows if the two Nellies ever met each other, but it is possible that they may have traveled in the same social circles in South Orange County. Nellie Mae Hanson went on to raise 10 children to adulthood and passed away in Los Angeles in 1944. Nellie Gail Moulton raised 2 children and enjoyed riding horses, painting, and supporting the arts until her death in 1972.
Now, many decades later, these ninth cousins are linked together! Nellie Gail Moulton’s paintings and sketches are on display in the Casa Romantica Gallery, which is located in what was once the bedrooms of Nellie Mae Hanson’s daughters! We have to wonder what they would think of this connection and the parallels their lives took.
