Labor Day Memories

Hola darlings!

First of all, HAPPY LABOR DAY to all of us who work so hard doing what we do, whether we work inside the home or outside the home - or do both!  It's all good, and it's all worth more than we make in pay, for damn sure!

Labor is under attack today in the United States and it's so sad. We're trying to fight back, but we're outgunned and out-moneyed and out-propagandaed.

2011: Wisconsin public union workers (teachers, policemen, firemen, prison guards, office workers, engineers,
etc. etc. etc. gather to protest outside of Madison's Capitol Building against the Scott Walker and the
Republican Legislature's destruction of public labor union rights.  Scores of arrests followed when the
Governor ordered the Capitol building cleared and state marshalls took the law into their own hands,
brutalizing and then arresting teachers, office workers, doctors and nurses for "resisting arrest" when
they were only exercising their state and federal Constitutional rights to peaceably assemble and protest.
The Republicans, who had taken control of the state thanks to the Koch brothers' money poured into the state's
elections, gutted public unions and then passed the most extreme-ever gerrymandered election
districts Wisconsin has ever seen.  The Lafolletes are rolling in their graves.  Our honored history
of clean government has disappeared into a foul pit of gross corruption, and Governor Scott Walker
is the most corrupt of all, while posing as a "true Christian family man."  Gag and puke.

Don't be fooled by people who are telling you there are "makers" and there are takers," doing the old "speaks with forked tongue" trick!  The TRUE MAKERS are the people who create wealth, like me -- working away for the past 45 plus years in an office, now making about $25 an hour compared to my boss's $650 an hour.  I work just as hard as he does and, in truth, without the work I do he wouldn't be able to do all that he does.  But there is really no such thing as "trickle down," nope.  Now I'm not crying the blues here because at my pay rate I gross about $51,000 a year, and I'm okay with that.  Is it what a person with a master's degree should be making, though, if we Americans value education like we say we do?  Hell no!

But, according to stats from the Congressional Budget Office, I'm considered above the median income in this country, I'm in one of the upper percentiles, darlings, woo woo.  How fricking sad is that?  Seven years of college education -- and I just scratch the surface of the median income...

Of course, those wages are BEFORE DEDUCTIONS.  If only I didn't have to pay 40% of that gross income every year to federal and state taxes and things like Medicare and FICA.  Meanwhile, my boss is crying the blues to me because his youngest will soon be going off to college and he "can't afford it."  Yeah, right.  Tell me about it, dude, who makes TWENTY-SIX TIMES MORE GROSS SALARY THAN I DO.  He, his wife and two children can't make a go of it on $650,000.00 a year.  And they pay less in taxes than I do.  For instance, his Social Security tax deduction is capped at $117,000.  The rest of his salary is not taxed for Social Security.  I pay Social Security taxes on 100% of my $51,000.  How is this fair?  And yet he and the rich and even richer are screaming about "high taxes."

The TRUE MAKERS ARE THE LABORERS, not the owners of the property.  Property rots and rusts away or, if it is land, goes fallow, without the MAKERS. Take a few minutes and just think about this, please.

My grandfather took a billy club to the head during a strike at J. I. Case in Racine, Wisconsin, standing up for workers' rights in 1934!  The then governor of the state of Wisconsin called out the National Guard to attack the strikers.  This was in the days before labor had ANY rights at all -- rights that we won after hard-fought battles and are now, less than 100 years later, rapidly losing.  Yeah, I hear it every single day, they won't ever do THAT, who would work for them, nobody...

Stupid, stupid people!  Think it can't happen to you...

Grandpa Newton lost his job as a skilled tool-and-die maker.  The family lost their home to foreclosure because Grandpa was blacklisted and couldn't find work -- not that much work was to be found in those years, anyway.  J.I. Case hired scabs who worked for pennies on the dollar compared to the workers they'd fired en masse.  Grandpa and his family of eight had to leave Racine and the prosperous middle-class lifestyle they'd known and move to Sturtevant, to what they considered a dumpy little house with a couple acres of land, where they grew fruits and vegetables and eeked out a living doing "truck farming" (as it was known back then) and growing much of their own produce to feed their family.  They scraped by.

That was before Wisconsin became one of the first states at the time to pass a law imposing a moratorium on foreclosures during the Great Depression, to prevent people who, through no fault of their own, were losing their homes because they couldn't find work!  I don't know this for a fact, but the story I remember hearing as a child and as I understand it now, as an adult, is that the bank owner at the bank that held Grandpa and Grandma Newton's mortgage on the Racine home gave them the option of taking the property out in Sturtevant (back then, nowheresville compared to living in Racine) in exchange for the equity in the Racine home, and Grandpa accepted the deal.  That bank owner, he didn't have to do it, but he was a decent man.  Back then, a lot of business was done on personal knowledge of the character of one's customers, and on a handshake.  My beloved Grandpa was a man of principle.  And so was that banker.

All I know is that I loved that house, with its magestic allee of trees alongside the gravel driveway, and the ever-fascinating acreage out back that offered endless hours of exploring and play-time and fantasy.  And the family, at that dumpy little house, survived the Great Depression, and Grandma actually sheltered people less fortunate than they were in the basement (the cellar, as they called it back then, which was not then finished in concrete block).  She had what was called back then "a soft heart."  I inherited mine from her, in more ways than one.  It's from Grandma's side of the family, I discovered through my geneological research, that I inherited this genetic lung disease (Pulmonary  Arterial Hypertension) that will, ultimately, cause my heart to fail and kill me.  Well, we all have to die some time.

Grandma Newton was famous locally for her canned and preserved foods, jams and "goodies" (a form of candied fruit -- I wasn't allowed to eat any because it had brandy in it).  Some of my earliest memories are of watching Grandma and Aunts Lolly and Mary Olive (her oldest and second-youngest daughters) working in the teeny kitchen of the only Grandma and Grandpa Newton house I ever knew, and loved.  The three of them were moving in what seemed like high speed around a tall butcher block "island" stirring, tasting, seasoning, ladling steaming hot concoctions into mason jars, the room filled with moisture from jars boiling in water and fruits and vegetables cooking on a six-burner stove.  I don't remember if it was gas or a wood burner, I assume it was a gas stove, as I was born in 1951 and we're probably talking about 1955 and after.  And then there was pickling, done on different days.
The Great Depression didn't end until the start of World World II, when the United States geared up to feed the war effort that was going on in Europe and, ultimately, sucked the USA in, too, including my Dad, who went off to join the Army when he was about 20.

The Frank Newton and Ida Belanger family, left to right, back row: Aunt Faythe; Aunt Mary Olive, my Dad
(John Francis Newton) in his WWII uniform, Aunt Laurel (Aunt Lolly), Aunt Valerie.
Front Row: Grandma Ida Belanger Newton, Uncle Gregory, Grandpa Frank Newton, son of David Newton a/k/a Villeneuve.

Dad was wounded and awarded a Purple Heart, and suffered severe frost bite to his feet. Those feet of his, they caused him much pain and suffering afterward until the time he died. But back then, a man didn't complain about such things.  He was changed in ways no one should ever have to be changed.  But he survived.  Millions did not.

My family was fortunate, compared to millions of other families. We survived the Great Depression, and we more or less prospered.  We survived WWII, and we more or less prospered.

Oh my.  The older I get (I turned 63 on August 19th, sigh), the more these memories become so precious to me.  I've no children of my own (THANK GODDESS!), but I am an aunt, and a grand-aunt, and a great-grand aunt.  Geez!  What will happen to those children of my nieces and nephews?

All those descendants will think it is absolutely normal to work for $5 a hour and not have employer paid-for health insurance, no paid vacation, no paid sick days, no paid maternity leave, no retirement benefits, no profit-sharing, hell no!  They will be, ahem cough cough cough, INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS.  Yeah.  A fancy name for 21st century slavery.  And, because none of the kids now graduating from high school knows any history or knows, really, how to read or write (they think "HOW R U" is writing), they will believe all of this is perfectly normal, and even worse, the way it should be...  They will believe that if they're not at the apex of the pyramid, it's because they're stupid, or lazy, or both.  Because that is what they are being taught -- they are being brainwashed into believing -- right now, as I write this.  There is a reason "1984" is no longer mandatory reading in high school...

Do you REALLY wonder why Congress has done nothing about the epidemic of illegal aliens flooding into our country?  Darlings, they're CHEAP LABOR.  That's the ultimate bottom line.  Now they're importing them as children, even easier to brain-wash. 

Real speak:  If Romney had won the presidential election in 2012 instead of Obama, we wouldn't be hearing a THING about the so-called crisis of 40,000 or 50,000 CHILDREN crossing the border between Mexico and the United States during the past few years. 

Think about it.

Family Tree Matters

A few days ago my friend, Rose, whom I "met" at ancestry.com when I first started researching the Newton/Villeneuve and Jablonski family trees (three-four years ago now), sent me a jpg of a very precious photograph.  The photo was identified (helpfully!) as my paternal grandfather, Frank C. (Chester) Newton, taken sometime between 1900 and 1910.

Rose is married to a gentleman whose grandmother was Myrtle Agnes Newton, one of my Grandpa Newton's older sisters.  The jpg she sent was one of Myrtle's family photos.

Myrtle was my great-aunt.  She married Forest Edward Sensiba in Iron River, Michigan, on July 19, 1915 and, as far as I know, lived in Iron River thereafter until her death.  Great-aunt Myrtle was the last of the children of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, David Newton/Villeneuve and Laura Ruth Bailey, to pass away, in 1976.  My Grandpa Newton died in 1964, and it was a traumatic experience for me, because we were very close.

Grandpa Newton was born on January 2, 1894.  I am a very poor judge of how "old" someone is, I always guess wrong!  I know Grandpa fought in WWI, I believe he was drafted sometime in 1917.  He received a 21-gun salute at his funeral.  I remember how very loud it was.  Of course, 1917 was seven years after this photograph was taken.  Do you think he is a teenager in this photo?  In 1904, he would have been 10.  I think he looks about 12, which would make the year of the photo 1906-1907.

He is sooooo handsome!  And as a young man (in his wedding portrait, for instance) very very handsome. When I saw this photograph for the first time a few days ago, I thought how much my youngest brother, Jeffrey, looks like Grandpa Newton. 

Here is a photo of Grandpa Newton about two years before he passed away. It was taken in the summer of 1962 in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, at my Aunt Laurel's house on Racine Avenue (old Highway 11).

Can you see the resemblance between the young Grandpa Newton and the 68 year old Grandpa Newton?  I do!  Here, we were getting ready to listen to a Cubs game on that newfangled invention, the battery-operated transistor radio!  See how big and bulky it is, in it's leather case! 

At the time, I was living at the house where this photo was taken for a year in order, so I was told, to make my Confirmation (Roman Catholic faith).  It was the house where my Aunt Laurel, Uncle Verne, Cousin Kathy, and Grandpa Newton lived. Grandma Newton had died in January, 1962 and Grandpa Newton had come to live with Aunt Laurel, his oldest daughter, after the house, further down Highway 11 was sold.  But after Rose sent me the picture of my young Grandpa Newton, as I printed it out and pondered where to add it to my gallery wall (in a constant state of flux right now), I began wondering if I may have been sent to live with my Aunt for another reason, too. 

As the oldest daughter of Grandpa Newton's oldest son, perhaps I was sent there as an experiment to see if I would be able to "cheer up" Grandpa.  Of course, as an 11 year old, that would never have occurred to me; I was just so happy to be there!  But now, looking back at age 61, I think it could very likely be true that there were more things at work behind the scenes, so to speak.

I'd always been close to both Grandpa and Grandma Newton, staying with them for weeks every summer for - I don't know how long!  From age 5 or 6, I think.  One summer, my sister Debbie, next to me in age, came along, but she was very homesick and she only stayed a few nights, and then mom and dad came to take her back home, and I once again had the front bedroom and that roomy bed that squeaked every time I moved all to myself.  I remember a night - isn't it funny how our memories work? -- my sister Debbie and I were laying in the double bed with the iron bedhead that was shoved up underneath the double window at the front of the house, overlooking the front yard (with a colonade of massive trees down the driveway to old Highway 11).  It was the first time Debbie was staying at Grandma and Grandpa Newton's too!  The windows were open.  In the distance, I could hear the whistle of a train, and all around, the sounds of night were there: crickets, animal calls, the sound of tires on blacktop as an occasional car passed by on that old narrow highway.  I would fall asleep looking up through the window at stars, every night.  So many stars.  Back then, Sturtevant was a tiny village on the road to Racine, with no street lights!  In Milwaukee where I lived, one could not see such a sky at night. And one never heard all of those sounds of "silence."

I remember how safe and snug and secure I felt in that bed, that night, with the windows wide open to balmy night air, snuggled underneath the blankets that smelled of fresh air and sunshine (line dryed), and for every night I stayed there, for years!  But my sister Debbie, nope, she was crying. She was scared.  She just wanted to go back home.  And no matter what I said, she wouldn't stop crying until she finally fell asleep.  My poor sis cried herself to sleep.

I was sad to see her go, a few days later.  I don't remember crying.  Did I?  What I'm thinking now is that I was thinking then that even though I was sad to see my sister go home, I would now have Grandma and Grandpa all to myself.  And so it was; but there was one summer when my next in age sister, Darlene, came to stay, and my recollection is that she loved it. Darlene is about 3 1/2 years younger than me.  She wasn't home sick at all.  But it was only for one summer.  That was the last summer I remember spending at the old house on Highway 11, so perhaps the following January (1962) was when Grandma Newton died, the house was sold, and Grandpa Newton went to live with Aunt Laurel and Uncle Verne.  And then I came to stay for a year. 

Maybe some day some distant relative will come along and stumble across this blog post, for as long as it exists, and will appreciate these recollections.  In my heart, these things seems like they happened - yesterday.  But they were over 50 years ago, now...

Oh, how I miss you, Grandma and Grandpa Newton.

Another Family Mystery: Murder by Strychnine!

Edited November 5, 2017:  Hola everyone.  Since reading the April 27, 2017 story by Rhonda Whetstone at the Stevens Point Journal this morning, "History: Man dies after eating mystery chocolates," (see her comment in the Comments Section to this pot at the bottom) I went back and checked my family tree just this morning and discovered I had made an error in my original 2012 comment, below.  Susan "Susie" Olbrantz was not a distant cousin of my mother's.  She was actually one of my mother's aunts - one of my Grandmother's sisters!  Obviously, that makes the story even more closely related to my family.  I am following-up with Rhonda Whetstone to see if she has learned anything further and if she will be writing a follow-up article.

My recollection at the time of going through this story with my mother in the summer of 2012 was that she had no recollection of it.  I do not recall if I referred to Susie Olbrantz then as Mom's cousin rather than her aunt.  My recollection from that time is that Mom acted as if she didn't even know who Susie Olbrantz was and had never heard of this bit of family history.  However, she had recently recovered from a very bad health scare and a months-long hospitalization, and we were going through her family tree binder I'd put together hastily for her.  I had felt a sense of urgency at the time, to get Mom's family tree together as much as I could.  Perhaps her memory was not the best then.  However, at the time of the events in question, Mom would only have been about 10 years old, so it is quite possible she was never told anything about this horrific event by Grandma or any other older family members who may have had knowledge of what happened.  Mom passed away in March of 2016 so I cannot ask her questions.

Since that time, a lot more information has appeared to be available on the Olbrantzs, but since our family is SO large, I have mostly restricted myself to concentrating on direct line ancestors, not ancillary ancestors like aunts and uncles and further back, or their descendants.  It was merely because I was - quite delinquently - going through my "Blog Posts/Spam" inbox this morning that I found a post to this story from Rhonda Whetstone and read about her 2017 article! 

When reading my initial post and my comments below, please amend any reference to my mom's cousin to my mom's aunt!  I decided to do it this way rather than mess with the original text of my post from 2012 (below the asterisk line).  Thank you.]

*********************************

Wow!  Distant cousin Lucille unleashed a family bombshell on me early this morning - good thing I didn't read the email last night, I wouldn't have gotten any sleep!

It seems, darlings, that there was a MURDER in the family!  EEK!

Here is the article from The Milwaukee Journal in October, 1937.  Because it was a google records I was not able to "grab" it to save it, I had to cut it up into screen shots and save it that way, so it's in bits and pieces but readable -- try to ignore the red borders!

Joseph was the husband of a distant cousin on Mom's side of the family (the Makuskis).  Susan Catherine Olbrantz was a Makuski before her marriage in 1925 to Joseph Olbrantz.  Lucille sent me this photograph that must have been clipped from a different article than the one I found (posted above):

I guess I've watched too many "48 Hours Mysteries" and "Dateline" murder stories on television.  Poison is a very PERSONAL type of weapon and historically, a woman's weapon, because it is neat, clean, non-violent -- it can be administered from a distance. The perpetrator of the crime does not have to be confronted with the bloody reality of a dying or dead person at one's feet as a result of one's actions with gun, knife, or club.  In short, poison is the perfect weapon for someone seeking to kill not in the heat of anger or passion (like with a gun or knife or, heaven forbid, beating someone to death with fists or object), but for someone seeking to kill in a "bloodless" way after thinking about it for a long time.  REVENGE.  Cold.  Calculated.

In cases like this, the spouse is usually the first suspect.  But in this case, Susan herself had ingested a piece of the poisoned candy, as had one of her children (son Raymond, age 11).  If her target was her husband, would she have risked the lives of one or more of her children and herself, too?  If murder/suicide was the goal instead (wiping out the entire family) would she not have made sure that her other children also ingested some of the poisoned candy?  And where the heck would she have gotten her hands on strychnine?  Where would anyone get their hands on strychnine in 1937?

I thought about this quite a bit today.  The year 1937 -- the US is still recovering from the Great Depression.  World War II had not yet started and the economy was still in bad shape.  Joseph Olbrantz supported his family with a WPA (Works Progress Administration) job, like millions of other men around the country did -- there was not much other work available.  Money for such luxuries as boxed candy (chocolates? not identified in the article) would have been non-existent.  It might have seemed unusual for a new box of candy, a pair of cotton gloves and a pair of children's stockings to appear on the front seat of the Olbrantz vehicle, but in a small community where everyone knew everyone and pretty much knew how each others' families were doing, the Olbrantzes may have figured that it was a gift left behind by a friend, a family member, or a well-wisher. 

The gloves aren't identified as men's, women's, or children's.  The stockings were called "children's stockings" - I assume because their size made them easily identifiable as such.  So, whoever left the box of candy knew the Olbrantzes had children young enough to wear the stockings.  And the gloves?  Hmmm....  Cotton gloves.  Hmmmm..... perhaps women's gloves?  Meant as a gift for Susan?  Cotton gloves and a pair of children's stockings - doesn't sound like gifts a man would buy for a young family.

What is truly frightening about this crime is that the entire family could easily have ingested some of the candy and died.  At the time, Susan and Joseph had at least two other children: Joseph, born in about 1929 and Elizabeth, born in about 1935.  Perhaps the only thing that saved them from strychnine poisoning was that they were young and probably already abed when Daddy brought out that deadly box of candy.

I was not able to discover any further information on the crime or any further newspaper articles.  I will keep looking, of course!

Phoebe, Oh Phoebe

Lots of action lately on the Family Tree front.  Some things I can talk about, some things I can't.

One of the wonderful things I have discovered while understaking this ardurous task of hunting down and verifying ancestors is people ready, willing and able to help me along my way!  I have connected with several shirt-tail relatives from different branches of the family tree and we've shared information and insights to our mutual enlightenment and furthering of our goals.  It is almost like magic!

Isn't Gertrude lovely?  Gertrude was one of my Grandpa Frank Newton's sisters.  There is a sgtrong family resemblance, but not with me -- with my youngest brother!  Seems strange to say that, but they have the same brow and eyes, and something about the structure of the face, plus the dark curly hair.  When I received this photograph last night in email I gasped when I opened it, the resemblance was that strong.  I don't know how old Great-Aunt Gertrude was in this photo, but I think she doesn't look out of her teens.

Just the past couple of days things have reached practically volcanic eruption pace with regard to my Newton ancestors and particularly my search for more information about Phoebe, Gertrude's older sister.

Phoebe Newton???

Phoebe, Phoebe.  I am obsessed with finding out as much as I can about the who and why of Phoebe. I am not sure if this image is Phoebe.  I cropped it from a family photo of Great-Grandfather David Newton, wife and some of his children.  Judging by the clothes, it was taken in the earlyto mid teens 1900's.  My instincts tell me it is her, but there is no positive identification.

Phoebe was born on August 11, 1881 and died of cervical cancer with complications on April 16, 1948. I knew Phoebe's birthdate, but not her death date.  That information and the fact that she died from cancer, and more information, came last night via email from a new contact through a contact I established months ago with a relative of descendants of another of Grandpa Newton's sisters, Florence.  Thank you both!

Phoebe evidently had a mind and will of her own, and was a truly liberated woman long before that term ever was dreamed up by Gloria Steinem, et al.

I have confirmed, thanks to other people also looking into Phoebe's past, that I did not overlook anything --(you can drive yourself crazy with that because you just can't find anything in information and records online, but you wonder - what am I missing?  What am I not doing right?  There just are no records of her marriage(s) to anyone at all prior to her giving birth in 1901, 1906 and 1914.  So my original surmise that Phoebe was an unwed mother appears to be the truth. 

GASP!  No big deal these days, millions of women around the world every year give birth to children outside of marriage.  But back then, in this strict Roman Catholic family - I cannot even begin to imagine have three children under such circumstances!

Her first two babies died; indeed, the first child was stillborn.  Her second child died a month after she was born.  I cannot even begin to imagine that, either.  Having a baby and he being dead; or having a baby and she dying a month later of pneumonia.  Maybe she was premature -- you know back then, they didn't have the means to save a premature child whose lungs were not yet fully developed.  Even President Kennedy and Jacqueline lost a baby that way.  So sad. So sad.

On the 1920 U.S. Census she still listed herself as Phoebe Newton, along with her daughter, Geneva, who had been born in 1915. Phoebe listed herself as single. 

By the time Great-grandfather David Newton-Villeneuve died in 1925, Phoebe was Phoebe Mineau.  She was the "informant" on David Newton-Villeneuve's death certificate as "Phoebe Mineau."

On the 1930 U.S. Census, Phoebe was Phoebe Mineau, and she was a widow.  Geneva, now 15, was listed as Geneva Mineau, but I think that was just a courtesy.  Sometimes back then children of the wife took the name of their step-father.  There was no legal adoption, etc. involved, it was custom.

Right now I'm on the hunt for Mr. Mineau. Thanks to the new information provided to me last night, I have first name(s).  I spent part of today doing searches and I think I have found his family and the records to back up my suppositions.  Now I need to find HIM when he was all grown up!