Estate of Whitcomb

A. C. Whitcomb, senior member of the early day San Francisco law firm of Whitcomb, Pringle & Felton, having acquired a considerable fortune by land speculation and transactions in stocks, withdrew from that firm in 1867. He continued at the bar nominally, but became president of the Citizens’ Gas Company, and was generally engrossed with his own private affairs. In 1870 he made.a visit to Paris, France, and soon concluded to make that gay capital his permanent home. He was a bachelor of about forty-five years, but now married a French woman, by whom he had *280 two sons. He died in Paris in 1888, leaving an estate worth $4,500,000, principally in California lands and eastern railroad bonds, the greater part of which he left by will to his two sons and their mother. Jerome Lincoln, of San Francisco, was named executor of the will to administer that part of the estate lying in California.

Article 6 of the will is in the following words: “I give to my nephew, the said Adolphus Darwin Tuttle, and to his son, Charles Whitcomb Tuttle, both of said Hancock, all'my interest, either real, personal or mixed, in the Jimeno Rancho, so-called, wholly or partly in the counties of Colusa and…