Judge Thomas VanCamp Julien

More than ten years after his departure for the west, he returned to Maryland to marry Martha Brewer on 9 November 1875. He was 37 and she was 31. Their first daughter, Annie Louise was born in Winnemucca the following year.

Sometime before the birth of their next child, Effie Estelle in 1877, the family moved from Winnemucca to Reno. They are shown on the 1880 census as residents of Reno and Thomas is listed as an attorney. He had begun practicing law in Winnemucca and we have a copy of a business card pairing him with his law partner E. M. Waldo. Family tradition has him "reading law" in the office of Judge McCarran's father and eventually becoming a partner, but I've been able to find no outside evidence to support this. (One obituary says that he studied law for several years in Illinois before coming west, but that information is suspect in that it also has him marrying a "Miss Beemer" native of Reno, Nevada.) In any case, he became a judge and was eventually appointed as a "supreme judge" of the state of Nevada. He resigned this job due to ill health about five years before he died. He was an active mason, and his lodge presented him with a magnificent gold-headed cane on his retirement.

Thomas Julien died of "Bright's Disease", a Victorian term for kidney disease, and was nursed at the family home at 111 West Street in Reno by first his wife (until her death) and then his two eldest daughters. He died at home on 6 July 1902 and is buried in the Julien family plot in the Masonic Cemetary in Reno. His obituary, with photos, was front page news in both Reno newspapers, The Gazette and The Journal. He was survived by his three daughters, Louise, Effie, and May, and two of his four sons, Frank and Ralph.

Martha Alice Brewer Julien

Annie Louise (Lou) Julien

Lou spent her entire life caring for her family, first her parents and siblings, and then keeping house for her sisters' children while they worked. She was a superb seamstress and cook, and a general handyman - building, creating, and making do to keep the house and household running on limited funds. In the 1930s she lived for a time in Montana with her nephew Bill Sourwine helping him to care for his wife after the difficult birth of their first daughter. For the most part, however, Lou shared a home in Reno, Nevada with her sister May until her death in the spring of 1968. Sadly for us, during her last years she destroyed the journals that she had kept all her life, and her extensive correspondance with her many cousins on the Brewer side of the family.

Effie Estelle (Fee) Julien

Fred Brewer Julien

Family tradition had always mourned Fred as the talented son who "died young". His death certificate lists the cause of death as a valvular heart defect, and his death was certainly sudden and unexpected. Stories in both Reno newspapers tell that he had started out from home for band practice one evening with his two younger brothers Frank and Ralph. He began to feel ill and they suggested that he lie down on the sofa in his father's downtown law office, and that they would return for him at the end of the evening. His brothers returned to find him dying. A doctor was quickly summoned, but nothing could be done. The news of Fred's death was carefully kept from his father, not being published in the newspapers or talked of in the home, for three days while Judge Julien recovered from surgery.

Fred Julien never married and left no children. The only two photos we currently have of him are a studio portrait of him at about the age of five, and one of him as part of the school orchestra at the University of Nevada shortly before his death.

Frank "Doc" Julien

Family tradition, handed down by his niece Juanita Kussell, holds that Frank was in love with a local girl, but that another man went to her with lies about Frank's character and actions. She broke off the relationship, and married another man. Juanita Kussell tells of being in the pharmacy as a child, years later, when the woman came in to apologize to Doc and tell him that she had learned the truth and regretted that it was too late to do anything to remedy the situation. Frank Julien never married and left no children.

He did, however, serve as a father figure and financial support for the children of his two sisters, May and Effie. We have a copy of a letter that he sent his Aunt Annie Brewer in Maryland in the early 1920s. He comments on the inexcusable behavior of May's husband in deserting her and her children and states his intention to do all in his power to care for his sisters' families.

Doc moved in with his sister Effie and her daughter Juanita upon is retirement in the late 1930s. He suffered with esophogial cancer during his last years, and died in a San Francisco hospital on 12 February 1944 as a result of surgical shock after cancer surgery. His sister May was with him, and his nephew Julien Sourwine, then of Washington, DC, assumed his medical expenses.

Ralph Waggoner Julien

Thomas Linn Julien

His sister May told her children and grandchildren the family story that when "baby Linnie" died, her mother was deeply depressed with grief. Her husband told the family that what she needed to console her was another baby in her arms. May always ended this story with the statement "and that was me".

I remember hearing this story as a young child thinking it very romantic, but later realized, as an adult examining the family records, that Martha (although well into her 40s, and with five living children between ten and four years old) must have already been six months pregnant with May when her baby son died. The idea that she should replace the dead child with a new baby thus becomes a fairly obvious prediction.

Anita May Julien

May lived in Reno while waiting for her husband to return from World War One. When he wrote to tell her that he was not returning and wanted a divorce, she gave him one, in 1922, continuing to live in her family home with her two older sisters, Annie Louise Julien and Effie Estelle Julien. She worked as a clerk in a Reno department store and raised her four children. She was active in the First Methodist Church of Reno until well into her nineties. She ran the church "crib room", and worked in the church office - in conjunction with that role she played the piano and acted as witness for countless weddings. A stained glass window in the church was dedicated to her in 198x.

In 1985, after a fall that broke her hip, she moved to live with her daughter Mary and granddaughter Diana in North Highlands, California. She died, the last of her generation, in the summer of 1988 at the age of 101 at the Roseville Nursing Home in Roseville, California survived by her two daughters, fifteen grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.