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Per family information sent to me regarding William "Guillermo" Wolfskill, thanks rsmith1022: "William Wolfskill was born on 20 March 1798, in Boonesborough, Kentucky, the son of Joseph Wolfskill and Sarah Reid. He was in Los Angeles around 1831, he was a fur trapper and later a ranchero after "marrying" Maria de la Luz Valencia by common law. His second marriage was to Maria Magdalena de Jesus de Lugo, the daughter of Jose Ygnacio de Lugo and Maria Rafaela Romero. The Wolfskills owned various land holdings in the City of Los Angeles. He died on 3 October 1866 and was buried the next day at the Los Angeles Plaza Church, (Olvera Street), Los Angeles, California."\par
Per WintersExpress.com: "William [Uncle Billy], the eldest, was the first to come to California. He arrived in the southwest in 1821 while the region was still held and administered by the Mexican government. He spent ten years trapping in the New Mexico area, where in 1828 he was made a Mexican citizen [Jose Guillermo Guisquiel/Wolfskill] . Eventually, he moved west to Los Angeles, opening the Santa Fe Trail to California in the process. William Wolfskill eventually turned away from trapping and from 1838 on devoted himself wholly to the vineyards in southern California which were to make him rich and famous. Vines and fruit trees were his primary interests. He relied on mission varieties initially an experimented with these and other types. In 1857, he became the first man to plant and grow oranges commercially in California. Marrying into an influential Mexican family in 1841, he became prominent in southern California society and public life".\par
Information from www.travelsos.net: "William Wolfskill was a frontiersman and trapper from Kentucky who ultimately came to California in 1831 seeking his fortune. In 1820 He joined with the Walker brothers, Joseph R. Walker and Joel P. Walker, Bill Williams and Ewing Young to trap beaver in New Mexico and southern Colorado. They were among the first to explore what would be known as the Sante Fe Trail, they were known as the Taos Trappers. The party was captured by the Spanish and held in Sante Fe until hostile Pawnee Indians threatened to overwhelm the Spanish force. In exchange for the help of the Taos Trappers fighting the Pawnee they got their freedom and the right to trap for 4 years. The trappers took good advantage of this by trapping on the upper Rio Grande and San Juan rivers then moving on to the head waters of the Arkansas River in Colorado, they netted roughly $30,000 per season. For the first few years in California, Wolfskill trapped sea otters along the coast of Alta California, and, over time, he would also try his hand at carpentry and saloon keeping. He experienced limited success in these ventures but enjoyed the contrast of the mild Southern California climate to the harsh winters of his Kentucky home, so to stay on, he began a limited farming operation. During the mid-1830s the pueblo at Los Angeles was thriving. Seeing the potential demand for large-scale grape and citrus farming, Wolfskill set out to meet the demand. He prepared citrus seeds by visiting the Mission San Gabriel, then in February 1836, he filed a petition with the Mexican government. Within three weeks he was granted possession of a ranch on a hillside slope in what is now downtown Los Angeles. This land, adjacent to his home, would become his first farm. After a few years of successful experimenting, Wolfskill had all he needed to pursue farming full time. In 1841, he planted his first 2-acre plot of citrus from seedlings of the Spanish sweet orange obtained from the Mission padres. In a short time, Wolfskill's farm had increased to 28 acres of planted citrus. When the gold rush of 1849 hit, Wolfskill was in full production and took advantage of the new market for his fruit. By ship, he sent his produce up the coast to San Francisco, where miners were willing to pay as much as $1 each for lemons and oranges as they offered the only local prevention for scurvy. Wolfskill worked diligently to improve the quality and yield of his citrus and to combat insect and disease problems. For this effort, Wolfskill is considered the father of the early California citrus industry. Before he passed away in 1866, Wolfskill had more than 100 acres in production with 70 acres devoted to citrus. There had been other attempts at citrus culture in Southern California, some time elapsed before there was much of an orange or lemon industry in this vicinity. In 1854, a Dr. Halsey started an orange and lime nursery, on the Rowland place, which he soon sold to William Wolfskill, for four thousand dollars; and in April, 1857, when there were not many more than a hundred orange trees bearing fruit in the whole county, Wolfskill planted several thousand and so established what was to be, the largest orange grove in the United States. He had thrown away a good many of the lemon trees received from Halsey, because they were frost-bitten; but he still had some lemon, orange and olive trees left. Later, under the more scientific care of his son, Joseph Wolfskill, who extended the original Wolfskill grove, this orchard was made to yield very large crops. In 1839, William Wolfskill, the former trapper from Kentucky, planted the first vineyard of table grapes in California, near what today is Los Angeles. He was the first person to ship grapes to Northern California gold miners. A remarkably talented individual and like most mountain men, was a jack-of-all-trades, John William Wolfskill was a pioneer settler, explorer, mountain man, botanist, investor, trapper, rancher, carpenter, sea otter hunter, master vintner, citrus magnate, and trader of goods. In 1756 his father Joseph, a young physician, came to Kentucky from Berks County, Pennsylvania with the George Boone party on their second attempt to establish a settlement there (later called Boonesboro). The original party had been rebuffed on their first attempt at settlement there by the local Indians. Born in Kentucky, John William Wolfskill was apparently eager and restless to make a name for himself. In 1831, after spending a few years on the frontier as a successful trapper and fur trader, he ventured west to settle near what is now the city of Los Angeles. Along the way he did more than a few remarkable things - such as blaze the old Spanish Trail - which would ultimately lead thousands of migrant settlers from Santa Fe, New Mexico into the Los Angeles Basin. He also led the first permanent party of non-Spanish migrants (the Howland party) to settle in Southern California. In 1841, John William planted the first grapevines on his 100-acre Mexican land grant. He later became the largest grower in the country with some 85,000 vines. Shortly thereafter, he planted 2500 orange trees on another plot, located between the Los Angeles River and what is now 4th and 6th Streets in downtown Los Angeles."\par
Per Irvine Ranch History, Irvine Historical Society, From Mexican Land Grant To Great Irvine Ranch, http://www.irvineranchhistory.com/chapter_1.html: "William Wolfskill, a contemporary of Don José Andrés Sepulveda, was one of the outstanding pioneers of California's wine industry. Wolfskill also was a cultivator of tropical and domestic fruits, the founder of the commercial orange industry, and is credited with having introduced large-scale lima bean culture to the Los Angeles area. Wolfskill was a man of great adventure. His family had been a neighbor of Daniel Boone in North Carolina, but moved to Missouri in 1809 when William was ten years of age. There young Wolfskill learned about fighting Indians, and emerged from his youth well-skilled in the arts of hunting, trapping, plowing, planting, and raising livestock. At age 23, he set out to seek his fortune in the rapidly expanding fur trade in the southwest. During the next few years, Wolfskill trapped, fought Indians, drove herds of mules for hundreds of miles, became a merchant and a trader, and led expeditions. On Wolfskill's first expedition to the Far West in 1830, he discovered what would become the most famous route from Taos, New Mexico to California - the Old Spanish Trail. Wolfskill first arrived in Los Angeles in February 1831. He visited the head priest at the Mission San Gabriel, Father Jose Bernardo Sanchez, who told Wolfskill and his partner that "their scrupulous honesty had preceded them there." Wolfskill decided to stay in California for a year and hunt sea otters along the coast. The venture was not entirely satisfactory. On September 21, 1833, Wolfskill presented naturalization papers to the alcalde (mayor) of Los Angeles as an indication of his intention to remain in the pueblo. Sometime that year, he bought a small tract of land containing some grape vines and settled down, one of the first white settlers in the area. Wolfskill entered into a common-law marriage with Maria de la Luz Valencia, daughter of Ignacio Valencia and Maria Luisa Varela de Valencia. A daughter was born in 1833, and the next year a son. To support his family, Wolfskill began building houses, fences, digging wells - anything he was commissioned to do. He built the now-famous adobe on Calle Principal. It served as headquarters for Governor Pio Pico when Los Angeles was temporarily made the capital of Alta California in 1845, and as headquarters for the American occupation forces under Captain Archibald H. Gillespie during the Mexican War. Later, after considerable remodeling, the adobe was turned into the Bella Union Hotel, the finest hotel south of San Francisco. The first official district census, taken in 1836, listed 1,675 non-Indian residents, 553 Indians living in rancherias, and 55 foreigners (29 Americans, the remainder Europeans). In Los Angeles, the census count indicated a total of 603 men, 421 women and 651 children. Wolfskill was listed as Esten Guillmo Wolfskil, age 38, property owner and laborer, married and a native of the United States. His name was followed by Luz Valencia, 30, Juan Je (Timoteo) Wolfskil, 1, and Suzanne Wolfskil, 2. Wolfskill continued to acquire more land and to plant more vines to enlarge his vineyard. He experimented with different methods of planting grape vines. He also studied the possibilities of distilling grape brandy, and investigated means for the commercial production of wine. While Wolfskill spent much of his time with his vines, Luz spent time with a neighbor, Francisco Araujo, a local silversmith of questionable character who was exiled from California in 1837. Luz left her husband and children to go with Araujo, who was later killed in a duel. The following year, Wolfskill traded his small vineyard for a 100-acre parcel that became the site of his permanent residence. At the time of the exchange, the parcel contained several thousand grape vines and a small number of fruit trees. Wolfskill's brother John came to live with him, and they immediately began to make improvements to the land. Rows of newly-set grape vines soon replaced open fields. Between 1838 and 1846, Wolfskill planted 32,000 new vines and became one of the leading vineyardists in the county. In 1839, Wolfskill completed a large adobe house on the property, one of the most dignified, well-furnished homes of early Los Angeles. A hand-carved cherrywood four-poster bed and a Chickering grand piano were shipped around Cape Horn for the house. By 1840, Wolfskill was a well-established yanqui in the pueblo of Los Angeles. Wolfskill was welcome in all the best homes. In 1840, his old friend, Don Antonio Maria Lugo, introduced Wolfskill to his niece Magdalena who was visiting Los Angeles. Doña Maria Magdalena Lugo was the daughter of Don José Ygnacio Lugo and Doña Rafaela Romero de Lugo of Santa Barbara. The Lugo family was among the oldest and most prominent of the Spanish California residents. Magdalena's father, son of Francisco Salvador de Lugo, was the second native child of Spanish extraction to be born in California. He was confirmed by Father Junipero Serra at Mission San Antonio de Padua in 1778. Magdalena's uncle, Antonio Maria Lugo, received one of the few land grants made during the Spanish period. His Rancho San Antonio, granted in 1810, consisted of 30,000 acres adjoining the pueblo of Los Angeles on the southeast. Magdalena and William were married on January 12, 1841. They had five children, but one daughter died at age four. The other children all remained in California and became influential members of the community, as did Wolfskill's children from his previous marriage. In time, the Wolfskill family would own Rancho Azusa de Duarte (6,500 acres), Rancho Santa Anita (9,000 to 10,000 acres), Rancho Rio de los Putos (17,754 acres acquired in 1842 and managed by Wolfskill's brother John; much of this property was later given to the University of California at Davis), Rincon del Diablo (present-day Escondido, also known as Wolfskill Plains), Rancho San Joses de Bueños Ayres (present day Westwood), Rancho Lomas de Santiago, and a portion of Rancho San Francisco (which yielded important oil resources and is the site of present-day Newhall). Wolfskill started what would soon be his famous orange groves the year he and Magdalena married. He obtained trees from Mission San Gabriel and set them out on a two-acre site adjacent to his adobe. Fruit sold commercially proved so successful that Wolfskill increased his orange grove to 28 acres by the early 1850s. In 1851, Wolfskill bought his neighbor's 104-acre property. It had more than 40,000 vines, grown from prized French wine varieties, and 35 orange trees, the largest number of any private garden in Southern California. These trees had been transplanted from Mission San Gabriel and yielded 5,000 to 6,000 oranges per season. Wolfskill believed the property had commercial possibilities, and within a few years, he had a total of 70 acres devoted to orange trees. An official of the Orange Grower's Union later remarked that Wolfskill's profits "probably had more to do with stimulating orange growing in Southern California from that time forward than any other influence. Other neighbors planted nurseries of oranges and lemons. In 1855, Wolfskill bought them out and bought even more land to extend his orange orchard. In April 1857, there were probably not more than 100 mature orange trees bearing fruit in the entire county of Los Angeles. Wolfskill's trees were not yet bearing fruit, since it takes seven years for a tree to produce enough fruit to be considered mature. He planted several thousand trees at this time, and established what was then the largest orange orchard in the United States. While his orange trees were maturing, Wolfskill was reaping the profits from his other fruit trees. In 1853, he began shipping fruit from San Pedro Harbor by ship. Of the 350 packages of fruit shipped that year, the largest number was shipped by the Wolfskill family - 98 packages containing 3,014 pounds of peaches, 487 pounds of apples, and 136 pounds of pears. In January 1856, Wolfskill's son-in-law introduced seedling strawberries to Los Angeles. That year, Wolfskill was awarded a diploma at the State Fair in San Jose for having the best vineyard in California. He was given a snuff-box by the California State Agricultural Society for producing the best lemons and grapes. Wolfskill's farm was considered the best in the state, with trees laid out in a pattern of neatness seldom equaled. In 1858, a committee from the California State Agricultural Society visited Wolfskill's orchards, vineyards and cultivated fields, and made a detailed report of each. They had nothing but praise. The report said, "Perhaps no man in the fruit business of this state has realized a more complete and satisfactory success than the proprietor of this place." By 1859, Wolfskill was producing 15 percent of the total state vintage of 340,000 gallons of wine. His 50,000 gallons were made from 449,000 pounds of grapes valued at $337,000. In 1862, Wolfskill was listed as having 85,000 vines. The Wolfskill family shipped the first trainload of oranges to eastern markets in 1877 via the recently completed Southern Pacific Railroad. The ice the fruit was packed in had to be replaced 11 times during the one month trip to St. Louis. The shipment marked the beginning of California's citrus export industry. An announcement in the Santa Ana Herald in 1886 proclaimed that "in the Wolfskill orchard is a new orange, which promises to become a great favorite with the growers." This was the Valencia, a summer orange which would thrive only in California. On a list of the most wealthy landowners in Los Angeles County published in 1851, William Wolfskill was listed as owning 1,100 acres assessed at $10,000. By comparison, Don José Andrés Sepulveda owned 102,000 acres assessed at $83,000; John Temple owned 20,000 acres assessed at $79,000; Abel Stearns owned 14,000 acres assessed at $90,000; and John Rowland owned 29,000 acres valued at $70,000. With taxes of $114, Wolfskill barely made the list, published the following year, of the 49 Los Angeles County people who paid taxes in excess of $100. The four highest taxpayers were John Temple at $912; Don José Andrés Sepulveda at $723; Abel Stearns at $719; and Antonio Maria Lugo at $676. Within six years, in 1858, Wolfskill was number three on the list of highest taxpayers. Wolfskill's fortunes were rising as Don José Andrés Sepulveda's were falling due to his extravagant living and gambling debts. In 1855, Wolfskill loaned Sepulveda and his wife, Francisca, $10,000. This note, secured by a mortgage on Rancho San Joaquin, ran for one year, with interest at two percent monthly, evidently a much lower rate than some were willing to give. The note was paid when due and netted Wolfskill $2,400. A firm believer in education, Wolfskill maintained a private school in his home for his children and the children of neighbors. In 1856, Joseph Edward Pleasants, whose parents were neighbors of William's brother John in Solano County, arrived to begin his term at the school and to work on the ranch. Pleasants would later be installed as caretaker of the land sold to James Irvine. Wolfskill also subsidized the first public school in Los Angeles when a lack of funding threatened its closure after its first year of operation. In 1860, Wolfskill purchased Rancho Lomas de Santiago from Don Teodosio Yorba and his wife, Doña Inocenciai Reyes de Yorba, for $7,000. He purchased the 47,227-acre rancho to graze his newly acquired stock of cattle, expecting to profit from the high prices for beef being paid by gold seekers in the north. Joseph Pleasants was placed on the land as ranch foreman. Rancho Lomas de Santiago was bounded on the north by the Santa Ana River, on the east by the mountains, on the south by Rancho Aliso, and on the west by Sepulveda's Rancho San Joaquin. The boundary of this rancho was subsequently the subject of much controversy. It was finally shown that the entire grant was unlawfully made by Governor Pio Pico and was nullified by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The United States Land Commission, however, had confirmed the grant to Yorba in 1854. Soon after the acquisition of Lomas de Santiago, Wolfskill brought carpenters and lumber from Los Angeles and began to construct a house for Pleasants on the banks of Santiago Creek. As the house was being built, the Yorbas contested the boundary. Wolfskill was indeed building the house on land that was not his. Not wanting to leave the house unfinished, he looked up several of the heirs to Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana and purchased their interest. Now he had as much right as anyone to be on the land. Throughout the six years he owned Rancho Lomas de Santiago, Wolfskill's stock had the right to roam the hills of the old Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana Spanish land grant. Unfortunately for Wolfskill, the severe drought of 1863-1864 followed shortly after his purchase of Lomas de Santiago. Cattle had sold for $8.00 a head in January 1863, but a few months later the starving animals were being slaughtered for the value of their hides and horns - $2.00 to $3.00 an animal. The late spring brought hot winds from the desert and millions of grasshoppers devastated the country. Joseph Pleasants later recalled that "...not over four inches of rain fell from October 1863 to June 1864." As soon as clouds would gather and rain appeared imminent, the Santa Ana winds would blow the clouds away and continue to blow for days, parching the already dry ground. In the summer of 1863, Wolfskill traveled to Tonopah in San Bernardino County to look after some of his mining interests. While traveling down the Mojave River, he noticed that the bottom lands were covered with grass for a distance of some 20 or 30 miles along the river's course. Peasants transferred the stock to this pasture - east of the San Bernardino Mountains - in mid-winter 1863. Wolfskill advised two of his friends and neighbors of the pasture, and they joined him in moving the herds, including their livestock as well. It took three months to move the 5,000 head of cattle and 1,000 horses. The animals stayed on the river bottom lands for more than a year, their return beginning in April 1865 after the rains had replenished the rancho. Though many ranchers lost up to 75 percent of their stock during the drought, Wolfskill and his friends only lost 25 percent. Despite his comparatively minor cattle losses, Wolfskill began converting the rancho to raise sheep. Cattle, however, continued to be an important crop. In 1864, William Wolfskill was listed as the second highest taxpayer in Los Angeles County, at $7,215. Only Phineas Banning, founder of Wilmington and the creator of San Pedro Harbor, paid more. His taxes were $20,000. In March 1866, William Wolfskill sold Rancho Lomas de Santiago and his share in Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana to Llewellyn Bixby; Dr. Thomas and Benjamin Flint, and James Irvine. Wolfskill sold the property to Flint, Bixby & Company for $7,000 - the same price he had paid the Yorba family six years earlier. The total acreage of Wolfskill's Rancho Lomas de Santiago was 47,226 acres. The change of ownership came just as the court commissioners were dividing up the old Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana. In the final adjustment, James Irvine and his partners were allocated a strip of land approximately three-quarters of a mile wide, running the full eight-mile length of the southeast line of the rancho from the ocean to the foothills. The total acreage received from the original 62,516-acre Spanish land grant was 3,800 acres. At the time the Rancho Lomas de Santiago sale was approved by the Land Commission, its title was unencumbered by legal entanglements. The official survey carried the northern boundary of the portion of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana purchased by Flint, Bixby & Company to the Santa Ana River, thus assuring water rights. This new purchase, combined with the acquisition of Rancho San Joaquin from Don José Andrés Sepulveda two years earlier and several smaller acquisitions, brought the Flint, Bixby & Company land holdings in Southern California to 108,000 acres - 168 square miles. The partners paid about $41,000 for all the land, approximately 38 cents an acre. Adjoining tracts later added increased their land holdings to approximately 125,000 acres. William Wolfskill, the man to whom Los Angeles and Southern California owed much of their development, died in 1866, six months after selling Rancho Lomas de Santiago and his share of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana to Irvine and his partners."\par
Information from Wikipedia: "William Wolfskill was a cowboy and agronomist from Los Angeles, California, who was highly influential in the development of California's agricultural industry in the 19th Century. Arguably his greatest contribution to agriculture was the Valencia orange, which quickly became the most popular juice orange in America and led to the naming of Orange County, California. He was one of the wealthiest men in Southern California for his time, and owned large tracts of land throughout Southern California which were used from everything from sheep grazing to orange groves."\par
Our Pioneer Heritage, Volume 8, The Indian and the Pioneer, The Earliest White Men Emigrant's Guide: WOLFSKILL: "In the autumn of 1830 a band of trapper-traders under the leadership of William Wolfskill set out from Taos over the Old Spanish Trail through Utah. Two journalists in the party, gave us our earliest detailed description of the Indians of the state, especially those in the Sanpete and Pahvant valleys south of Utah Lake. The Reverend Orange Clark's narrative evidently begins after the crossing of the Green. He writes: "They shaped their course in a northwest direction, to a place known then by the name of 'St. Joseph's Valley', perhaps Castle Valley, which they found to be the most desolate and forlorn dell in the world. Everything about it was repulsive and supremely awful. Unanimously they resolved to abandon so dreary a region, & rather than sojourn there, forego the acquisition of any benefit in the world. Two short days march however brought them to a place entirely the reverse of it. To which they gave the name of 'Pleasant Valley' (Sevier Valley)....Wading, in the snow, as the sun went down, one dreary evening, a solitary Indian was discovered, whose dwarfish stature & lean, half starved nakid person, a heap of bones & skin, well corresponded with the region where he dwelt. A single rabbit-skin hung over his otherwise nakid shoulders. With a rude bow & arrows he was hunting rabbits. He was met by surprise & started, with affrighted visage, to run. But impeded by the deep snow he could not escape, & stood trembling with affrighted visage, in expectation of immediate death. They soothed him with presents of awls, beeds and vermilion, & he sat down to contemplate the articles given him. At the request of the strangers he led them to his people".\par
Per http://www.ocbtp.com/powwow/9902viva.html: "The area that is now Los Angeles entered the pages of recorded history in 1542 when Cabrillo named San Pedro Harbor the Bay of Smokes because of the many campfires staining the air over twenty-eight Indian villages in the area. One of those villages, Yang-na, is known to have been at the center of todays downtown. Herbert Bolton cites missionary Juan Crespi as having told his diary in 1769 of a river Portola named Porciuncula and a plain generously endowed with cottonwoods and alders. His was the first recorded sighting by a nonnative of the Los Angeles plain. Portolas party also saw the gooey pits of Rancho La Brea and explored the San Fernando Valley. Another ten years passed, however, before Felipe de Neve founded a pueblo he named la Reina de los Angeles (the Queen of the Angels) in 1781, populating it with forty-four settlers from Sinaloa. Even then the population was ethnically diverse, with Indians and blacks well represented among the Spaniards. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, some 315 persons lived in thirty adobes. Although geographically located, the settlement was most populous of all the pueblos in California. Los Angeles was even considered for the honor of being provincial capital in 1816, but Monterey prevailed. Before too long the likes of Joseph Chapman, pirate turned carpenter; John Temple, real estate wizard; and William Wolfskill, who covered the area with orange groves, arrived to help shape Los Angeles. At the outbreak of the Mexican War, U.S. forces seized the city, but it was quickly lost when Angelenos revolted against the harsh rule of Lt. Archibald Gillespie of the marines. When Mexican rule ended, the city was poised for greatness, but the gold rush diverted the worlds attention to the north and turned Los Angeles into little more than a ghost town. It grew, though slowly, thanks to the port at Wilmington (courtesy of Phineas Banning) and two railroads: the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe. Stephan Birmingham writes that even after the state was admitted to the Union, Los Angeles was a sluggish, dispirited town where lynch law prevailed."\par
Per http://www.sfgenealogy.com/spanish/calfam.htm: "Although officially closed to unauthorized commerce, Alta California was increasingly visited by trading ships, trappers and other merchants, especially after Mexico's independence in 1824. Among those that permanently settled were Juan Lorenzo Bruno Bandini and Juan Malarin from Peru; Joseph Chapman, William Edward Petty Hartnell, Santiago Johnson, William A. Richardson, Juan Francisco Smith ("Jean Noel"), Michael Claringbud White ("Miguel Blanco") and John Wilson of Britain; and from the United States came Juan Bautista Robert Livermore, Juan Francisco John Gilroy and Francisco Pliny Fisk Temple; also Miguel Luis Nathaniel Pryor and William Wolfskill of Kentucky; Jacob Primer Leese of Ohio; and Daniel Martin Call, William Goodwin Dana, Henry Delano Fitch, Daniel Antonio Hill and George Joseph Rice of Massachusetts."\par
Per Pamela Storm Wolfskill, Rootsweb Public Member: "I do have one early California family that I know very little about... Maria dela Luz VALENCIA, b. ca. 1806, whom I've been told is supposedly the daughter of Ignacio VALENCIA and Maria Luisa VARELA. Luz was the common-law "wife" of William WOLFSKILL, and they had two children, most likely born in Los Angeles: Maria Susana (1833) and Juan Timoteo (1834). Timoteo is my husband's great-great grandfather".\par
Per War of 1812 Service Records: Name: William Wolfskill Company: JOHNSON'S REG'T, MOUNTED, KENTUCKY VOLS. Rank - Induction: PRIVATE Rank - Discharge: PRIVATE Roll Box: 231 Roll Exct: 602\par
Per Huntington.org Marriage Records, http://missions.huntington.org/MarriageData.aspx?ID=234: Guillermo Wolfskill married Magdalena Lugo 12 January 1841 Mission Santa Barbara #00233. Guillermo's origin Precidio de Santa Barbara. Magdalena baptized Mission Santa Barbara FBAP #00278. Both sets of parents Unstated. Sacrament Witnesses are Nicolas Allen and Josefa Borunda. Officiant and Recorder is Narciso Duran.\par
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Per 1850 U.S. Federal census William Wolfskill is living in Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, born abt 1798 Kentucky Head Married Farmer, spouse name Magdalena\par \par
Per 1852 California State Census William Wolfskill is living in Los Angeles County, California, age 52, born abt 1800 Kentucky Head Married Farmer, spouse name Madelina, last residence MO\par
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Per 1860 U.S. Federal census William Wolfskill is living in Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, born abt 1798 Kentucky Head Married Farmer, spouse name Madalena\par
Per 1867 Pacific Coast Directory William Wolfskill is living in Santa Nieta Ranch, Los Angeles, California. Occupation is orchardist.\par
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