HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.                   587

    John Wynkoop Gilkyson is a native son of the Golden west, his birth occurring at Chico, Butte county, California, February 5, 1875, and he is a son of John W. and Ruth (Hobart) Gilkyson, the former a native of Pennsylvania and the latter of Michigan. On the maternal side Mr. Gilkyson is descended from Edmund Hobart, who came from England to America May 7, 1633, locating in Charlestown, Massachusetts, with his family; Garret A. Hobart, former vice-president of the United States, being a lineal descendant of this emigrant. Members of this family were participants in the Revolutionary war, Daniel Hobart having been an officer in Colonel Colman's

588                        HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.

regiment, and was killed at the battle of White Plains, fighting under General Washington, October 28, 1776. Its representatives also took part in all the early wars and were prominently identified with the early history of the country. Randal Hobart moved west, locating in Michigan in 1831, where he made his home until 1849, and was the first registrar of deeds of Calhoun county and magistrate of the town of Marshall. With his son William he came to California in 1849, settling in Butte county, his family joining him in 1852, and he filled the positions of deputy county clerk, county judge and magistrate. In 1856 he joined the conference of the Methodist Episcopal church and became an able minister of the gospel, having been superannuated in 1862, and his death occurred on his farm near Chico, Butte county, in February, 1870. In his family were twelve children, four sons and eight daughters.
    John W. Gilkyson, the father of him whose name introduces this review, came to the Golden state in 1850, settling at Bidwell's Bar, Butte county, where in the early days he followed mining and for many years conducted a hotel at Bidwell's Bar, while in later years he was prominent in public life, holding the positions of city clerk of Chico, recorder of Butte county and was assistant commissary under Governor Perkins at the San Quentin prison. Retiring from active life at the age of sixty-five years, he thereafter made his home in San Jose, where he passed away in death on the 3d of January, 1903, at the age of seventy-three. Throughout life he was an active worker in the ranks of the Republican party. His wife was called to the home beyond on the 10th of January, 1902, aged sixty-two years.
    John Wynkoop Gilkyson received his elementary education in the public schools of Butte county, later attending the Boys High School and the grammar school of San Francisco, graduating therein at the age of eighteen years. When only twelve years old he became a messenger boy for the Pacific Bell Telephone Company in this city, performing his duties during the day and attending school in the evenings, and two years later, when fourteen years of age, was promoted to the position of inspector of telephones. Since then he has taken up switch-board work and was placed in charge of the bell department of the company's factory in San Francisco, later, in 1899, having been made manager of the western branch office, and in 1900 the company incorporated under the name of the Pacific States Telephone Company. In 1901 Mr. Gilkyson was made local manager of the company's office at San Jose and in the latter part of the same year was appointed county manager of the San Jose district, including the counties of Santa Clara, San Mateo and Santa Cruz. His long continuance with this company stands as unmistakable evidence of his ability and the confidence resposed in him by its officers--a confidence that has never been betrayed in the slightest degree.
    In San Francisco, on the 19th of June, 1895, Mr. Gilkyson was united in marriage to Hattie W. Tennis, a native of that city and a daughter of Thomas and Margaret (Struve) Tennis, who were early settlers in California. The one son born of this union, Darwin F., is now aged seven years.

                             HISTORY OF THE NEW CALIFORNIA.                   589

In his fraternal relations Mr. Gilkyson is a member of the Native Sons of the Golden West, the Knights of Pythias and the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and his political support is given to the Republican party.

Source:

Irvine, Leigh H., [edited by], History of the New California: Its Resources and People, Volume I, New York, Chicago, The Lewis Publishing Company, 1905, pp. 587-589.

    Richard Wynkoop, in the 1904 edition of the Wynkoop Genealogy in the United States of America, has this to say about John Wynkoop Gilkyson Jr.'s father's family on pages 133-134:

    656. Elizabeth Wynkoop, (Gerrit 372, Gerardus 153, Gerrit 45, Gerret 5, Cornelius 1,) born March 20, 1787: died September 8, 1876, in Trenton, N. J.: married, March 14, 1811, Elias Gilkyson, who died about 1873, aged 84 years. They lived in Bucks County, Penn.; and afterwards at Yarleyville, in the same State.
    Elizabeth had kept house for her grandfather, after the death of her grandmother, and until her own marriage.
    Children of Elias and Elizabeth Gilkyson:
1074. James Gilkyson: a lawyer, in Doylestown, Penn.
1075. Albert Gilkyson. He lived in Jersey City.
1076. John Wynkoop Gilkyson. He was, at one time, deputy sheriff, at Orrsville, Cal.
1077. Stephen Rose Gilkyson. He was, in 1861, Captain of Comp. A, 6th Reg. N. J. Inf., and served for three years, and returned as Lieut.-Col. He raised the 40th Reg. N. J., and served until the close of the war. He was wounded in the second battle of Bull Run, and in the Wilderness.
1078. Caroline Gilkyson: m. Theodore Wallace Hill, and lived in Trenton, N. J.

    Once again, I'd like to thank Tom Wilbur, [email protected], of Okemos, Michigan, for sending me a transcript of this biography way back on the 9th of December, 2005. After months and months of trying I was finally able to secure a copy of the original pages so that I could present it as it was originally published, with the page numbers.

    Tom, I'm sorry for the long delay on this one, but frankly, it's getting tougher and tougher to borrow things through Inter-Library Loan nowadays. Libraries all over the country are suffering enormous budget crunches, and loan requests for material which used to be easy to fill are now met with flat out refusals. I feel sorry for anyone just starting out today to build a comprehensive family history site like the Wynkoop Family Research Library. Doing it the old-fashioned way, through ILL, is not going to get any easier.

    On the other hand, online projects like Google Book Search with its effort to OCR as many out-of-copyright books and manuscripts as possible and publish them on the internet, thus creating an easily searchable, virtual library accessible from anywhere on the globe, will eventually make life much easier, but you're going to need to exercise a lot of time and patience while waiting for that dream to come true. Worse yet, all this new/old material is only going to surface on a haphazard basis over the coming years as the publishers and Google thrash it out in the courts. You would have thought that publishers would have learned from the legal battles back in the 1980s between the movie studios and video recording manufacturers that one hand washes the other. Book publishers, like movie studios, can have more than one bite of the apple and everyone will benefit.

    Personally, I'll take my bite now.

    All my best,

    Chris.