The Orange County Register
By Frank Mickadeit
March 24, 2008

The late California Gov. Washington Bartlett might not have been much of a governor – he only served nine months before dying in office in 1887 – but I believe I’ve helped establish that he did not father children out of wedlock, or at least none we know of.

Unfortunately for Orange County judicial candidate Michael Bartlett, the late governor is also not his great-great-great grandfather, as he wanted to claim on his ballot statement. Washington Bartlett is Michael Bartlett’s great-great uncle.

To recap: Bartlett, a former San Clemente city attorney, is running against Deputy D.A. Nick Thompson in one of the four contested Superior Court judge races on the June 3 ballot. In submitting his ballot statement to the Registrar of Voters Office, Bartlett said, “(m)y interest in public service comes from my great-great-great grandfather, Washington Bartlett, the 16th Governor of California.”

Thompson filed a lawsuit last week to challenge that statement (and others), noting that official state histories say the governor was a bachelor and there’s no record of him having children. But because of the way the law is written, Thompson had the burden: he had to prove a negative – that Michael Bartlett was not the direct descendant of the governor.

Because the ballot statements must be printed this week, Thompson had only between the court hearing Thursday until one scheduled for this afternoon to do the research. Good luck getting that kind of help Good Friday-Easter weekend.

But enter Anaheim Hill genealogist Sharon Moore Elliott. She read my column Friday and asked me I’d be interested in what she might be able to find out. Oh, yeah.

By Saturday morning, she’d sent me the last of about 15 documents. A few were merely newspaper clippings from the 1880s, which I doubt Judge Corey Cramin would accept as proof. But highly persuasive were U.S. Census records from the 19th and 20th centuries, which lead to an inescapable conclusion: Michael Bartlett is the great-great grandson of Gov. Washington Bartlett’s brother, Columbus Bartlett.

(As an aside, Elliott told me that digging up the governor – my favored solution for the sheer amount of column material it would provide – wouldn’t have proved anything other than that he was some relation to Michael Bartlett. All Bartlett men would have the same Y chromosome, she said.)

Oh, the smugness with which I casually dropped this little bombshell on my roommate Wayne Gross Saturday morning as we made coffee in the kitchen of our absurdly palatial apartment complex. He just happens to be Michael Bartlett’s lawyer on this.

Then Wayne went to his room with the walk-in closet and I went to mine and we started working our phones and computers. I sent the supporting documents to both and him and Thompson’s attorney, Bruce Peotter, who’d I had advised to stand by.

A short while later, Wayne emerged from his spacious private quarters and informed me his client had pretty much come to the same conclusion as Elliott. He sent me a statement from Bartlett: “I had always been told that Gov. Bartlett was my great-great-great-grandfather. Based on new and independent research, however, I have learned that Washington Bartlett was actually my great-great uncle.” He noted Columbus Bartlett was a distinguished man in his own right, an attorney and UC regent.

Naturally, Peotter and Thompson’s political consultant, Brett Barbre, were overjoyed and sent me a statement profusely thanking me and – more rightly – Elliott for our fine, fine work.

Thompson will still challenge Bartlett in court today on other elements of his proposed candidates’ statement, including references to Bartlett’s support by some judges and the Republican Lincoln Club. State law restricts how such things can be used in ballot statements.

“We have absolute confidence that the judge will dismiss the remaining portions of a petition that is nothing more than a strategic attempt to distract the voters,” Gross said in a prepared statement.

So while the lawyers spent Saturday afternoon negotiating, I got to go down to Laguna Beach High and catch the matinee of a lively version of “West Side Story,” which features my former Lagunatics castmates Kelly Hancock, Erica Jones and Daniella Crivello. It also just happens to feature Wayne’s boss’s son, Brendan O’Hare, and I marveled at how often I’m reminded what a small, small county we live in.