Ukiah, California. A side trip on the road north.
I stopped in Ukiah at the county courthouse to look for my great-grandmother Helene Rickard’s birth certificate.
She was born in Mendocino County in 1898. Her parents had sailed around South America from Ireland because of the potato famine — around Cape Horn, all the way up the Pacific coast, to land in northern California. That’s a significant amount of effort to start over. The journey would have taken months. The California they arrived at was not the California I drove through.
The courthouse didn’t turn up what I was looking for. Birth records from the late 1800s are inconsistently preserved. I drove through Mendocino on the coast highway anyway, seeing what the country looks like that they chose.
The family ended up in El Centro eventually. Imperial Valley, well past the century turn. The journey from Ireland to the Salton Sea is not an obvious one. It took several generations and several more migrations to get there.