On the Newtons, blood, and bank-robbing cousins
November 7, 2009 | Comments Off
My dad’s forebears were glad to tell you about my grandma’s Pre-Revolutionary Virginian ancestor or our connection, by marriage, to the Mannings of football fame, but they seemed to suffer from a peculiarly targeted kind of amnesia when you started asking about the Newton line.
I always assumed this caginess was limited to my little branch of the family tree, but recently I tracked down my granddad’s cousin, now 83, to see if he could verify that Jesse Newton, Arkansas spiritous liquors retailer, is in fact our ancestor. He could not.
“We had the same problem that you had,” he told me. “We just could not get anyone to give us information — it was as if the Newton family started with Minnie.”
He theorizes that we’re related to the Newton Boys, “America’s most successful bank robbing family,” which would sort of delight me, actually. A recent (fascinating) article in Hill Country Magazine describes them this way:
By the time they were captured (after a $3 million train robbery near Chicago in 1924), the “Newton Boys” had netted more loot than the James Gang, the Dalton Boys and Butch Cassidy combined. During that time, they had never killed anyone, and (in their rare daytime crimes) were famous for the courtesy with which they treated their victims.
But while their family was descended from a Jesse Newton of Arkansas, and mine probably was too, they’re not the same man. So far I haven’t found any tie between our lines, just similar names and close proximity.
Pretty Boy Floyd (above), on the other hand, appears to be my 8th cousin on my dad’s mother’s side.
Knowing my Newtons, I can’t rule out the possibility that they were cagey about their background not because they actually had anything to hide, but because they feared their ancestor might be mistaken for someone disreputable. Which is kind of funny given that their mantra was always loyalty to blood.
When I severed ties with my dad, my grandparents froze me out for a while. First my granddad sent a warning. “What’s happening up there?” he wrote. “Are you changing your e-mail also? It must be serious to cause you to cut your roots. Better think about it long and hard.”
I am, Grandpa, I am. Just not in the way you intended.
In honor of Cousin Pretty Boy: At his blog about WPA writers, David Taylor recently posted about the “1930s outlaws who capitalized on the unpopularity of banks to boost their popular support. You see reflections of that atmosphere in the WPA guides and in the stories the WPA writers gathered.” He ends with a quote from that Woody Guthrie song.