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Thurtell and Related Families
Notes for Walter Thurtell (MURRAY)
The family tree done by Harriet Thurtell about 1900 and theHistory of the
Thurtell Family done by Susan Persia Thurtell about 1968, both in the
possession of Susan Persia Thurtell Miller, show Walter Thurtell married
Mercedes.
Information received in 1997 from Peter Murray shows that James Thurtell,
the father of Walter, added the last name Murray in 1829. Walter
Thurtell Murray (1826-1875) married before1856 Mercedes Espinoza, who
died in 1878. He shows that Walter Thurtell Murray was born in 1826 in
London England, and died October 5,1875, in San Luis Obispo, California.
He was a lawyer, printer, and finally a Judge of the District Court of
San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Buenventura, California. An ardent
Republican, he was a founder of the vigilante movement, and founder and
publisher of the San Luis Obispo Tribune newspaper, which was strongly
Republican while he was connected with it. His initial apprenticeship
was in England from age 13 to 16 in the chambers of an eminent London
barrister. After moving to the United States he gained experience in the
printer's trade in Boston as a compositor for a large newspaper and at
the same time published on his own a small journal, the "Mechanics'
Apprentice." He arrived in California on October 21, 1847, from New York
in the Mexican War as a volunteer in the Stevenson Regiment having
traveled around the horn and seen action in Mexico. When the regiment
was disbanded in 1848, he migrated to gold rush country; and in the town
of Sonora in 1851 became proprietor, with his former companion in arms,
James O'Sullivan, of the first newspaper in Tuolumne County, the Sonora
"Herald." Finally, in 1853, he settled in San Luis Obispo where he was
admitted to the bar and established a law practice. He is described in a
history of San Luis Obispo county as a man of unusual ability, fluent in
French and Spanish. He married Mercedes Espinosa before 1856.
His extensive correspondence, including much with relatives and
connections back in England, is preserved in the archives of Bancroft
Library, University of California at Berkeley. His unfinished memoirs
are in the possession of his great grandson, Col. Murray Warden.
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