On my father's paternal side, my great, great grandfather was named Walter Clement. He was a civil engineer in the very early days of the United States, and helped to survey and lay out the boundaries of some of the Midwestern states. He moved from the East Coast to Iowa and settled in the small town of Newell, Iowa. While there he met and married Melinda Newell. The town of Newel, in Buena Vista county, was settled and run by the Newell family. Walter and Melinda Clement had three (or four) daughthers and one son. Thier Ohio-born son, Henry Newell Clement, was my great grandfather. He studied law and was a graduate of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. A very versatile person, at one time he was newspaper editor and was very musical. He married Mary Ann Hull, a school teacher, who was born in Pennsylvania. Almost all of Mary's family was in the education field. Henry and Mary had two sons and a daughter and moved the family to California to practice law. For awhile, Henry was part of a very large law firm in San Francisco but later started his own practice. When he passed away, in 1902, he had one of the largest law libraries in that area of the state. This was lost unfortunately in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, along with many other records and history of the Clement family. My grandfather, Walter O. Clement one of Henry and Mary's sons, was born in Eddyville, Iowa before the family moved to California. Walter was a building contractor in the San Francisco Bay Area.

On my father's maternal side, my great grandfather, Daniel Norcross, was born in Philadelphia in the early 1820's. He was a descendant of English and French ancestors, including Daniel Norcross, who emigrated in 1699 from Lancashire, England and settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Daniel Norcross married Harriet Newell Abbott in 1844, who was a descendant of the original New England Puritans. In 1848, news of the discovery of gold in California created tremendous excitement along the East Coast and Daniel Norcross did not ignore the possibilities. He was determined to be amoung the first to seek the golden shores of California, even though he was already a successful businessman in Pennsylvania. He and a friend, General Winchester, made preparations and sailed for San Francisco aboard the ship "Tarolinta" in 1849.