Family History Research
Repinski-Dietz Family History
Clyde Barrow-13th Cousin
As I continue to dig into the old family tree, the "leaves" that fall off and scatter to the ground are of many different colors.
The "leaf" I found a while back came to me via a story in the "Dallas Morning News".
It is funny how family paths diverge and one branch of a family goes one way and one goes another.
The path of one of my more "infamous" ancestral cousins and his family wound its way from the nobility of England via the Dryden Family of Cannon's Ashby in Northamptonshire where two sisters of the name Dryden would each sire offspring who's progeny would eventually immigrate to North America in the 17th Century.
My 11th Great Grandmother's line would have quite a few famous descendants as would my 12th Great Aunt's line. It is this line that I write about today.
Following is my family ancestral connection to one of the 20th Century's most notorious criminals and a family tree and story that not many people have heard about except for the infamous son that gave the "Barrow" name widespread notoriety for the better part of the 20th century.
Meet my 13th Cousin....
Clyde Chestnut Barrow and his family line that connects to my family line.
Clyde Chestnut Barrow-13th Cousin
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| Clyde Chestnut Barrow |
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| My Blood Relationship to Clyde Barrow |
Introduction
A Shared Common Family Ancestry To Clyde Barrow
It is often said that all of humanity is connected in one way or another if one looks hard enough.
I am lucky to have descended from numerous lines with some pretty good written documentation.
It is with one of these lines from my mother, Marlene Dietz Repinski that I discovered I and my siblings and their children share a common ancestral heritage and pedigree with the infamous Clyde Barrow
Our Shared bloodline began with Sir John Dryden (1524-1584) and Elizabeth Cope (1529-1584).
Our shared 12th Great Grandfather, John Dryden, came from a very old noble family that traces it's origins to the time of William the Conqueror.
Our shared 12th Great Grandmother, Elizabeth Cope's ancestry goes back to English Royalty with her 9th Great Grandparents being King Edward I and Queen Eleanor (Castile).
My line would come down through my 11th Great Grandmother, Bridget Dryden Marbury through her daughter Katherine Marbury Scott(my 10th Great Grandmother) who came to North America in the middle 1600s and settled in Boston Mass and eventually Providence Rhode Island.
Clyde's line would come down through her sister, his 11th Great Grandmother, Emma Dryden Bury, who's daughter Bridget Bury Hutchinson had a son named Thomas Hutchinson.
Part 1
The Beginning of Clyde Barrow's Family Line in North America
"Mid 1600's -Early 1900's"
Thomas Hutchinson arrived in North America in 1682 on a ship called "The Welcome" with none other than William Penn of Philadelphia.
William Penn granted Thomas Hutchinson 600 acres in what is now Hopewell NJ. This Hutchinson line that prospered in the New Jersey of the late 1600s with Thomas (1640-1689) and his wife Dorothy Storr (1650-1689).
Clyde's ancestral line then "sauntered" over to Maryland via Thomas' and Dorothy's daughter, Elizabeth Hutchinson (1657-1695), who married Thomas Letchworth (1655-1713).
From there the line continued for a few generations in Maryland via their daughter, Dorothy Letchworth (1675-1719) who married Thomas Lucas Sr. (1650-1722).
Their son Thomas Lucas Jr. (1688-1756) would marry Anne Hungerford (1692-1756).
A daughter named Margaret (1717-1765) would marry Ninian Beall Hamilton (1717-1784).
Margaret and Ninian Hamilton in turn would have a daughter named Sarah Hamilton (1747-1833) who would marry Richard Reynolds (1738-1786). At some point, Margaret and Ninian must have moved to Virginia as this is where Sarah was born.
Sarah Hamilton Reynolds above and her husband Richard Reynolds settled in Georgia as this was where their son Spenncer Reynolds was born.
Spencer Reynolds (1767-1830) married Sofia Lee (1782-1830) and they had a daughter named Elizabeth. Spencer died in Tenn. but I am not sure if this is a location that they ever lived in as daughter Elizabeth was born in Georgia....
Elizabeth Reynolds (1789-1860) who was born in Georgia and married George Barber (1786-1854) and they settled in Shelby Texas. Elizabeth and George had a daughter named Phoebe who was born while the family still lived in Georgia.
Phoebe Barber (1819-1900) married Samuel Barron (1808-1886). This couple would have been Clyde's maternal great grandparents. They settled in Nacogdoches, Texas in 1859. Their story is of some interest in that as I was researching I found the following tidbit:
{On Sept.21,1859 then governor I.H. Runnels gave to Samuel B Barron 160 acres of land for his loyality to the state, located in Nacogdoches County(corner of the cross roads of the Martinsville/Nacogdoches road and the Melrose/Henderson starting in the center of said roads and going east toward Martinsville and going south towards Melrose. Samuel received this land for fighting in the Texas War for Independence from Mexico}.
The town of Nacogdoches is where Clyde's grandmother, Mathia Barron (1843-1910) , who was the daughter of Phoebe and Samuel Barron, was born. Mathia would marry William Wilson Walker (1843-1920) and their daughter would be Clyde Barrow's mother.
Cumie/Tabatha Walker Barrow (1876-1942) would meet a man named Henry Basil Barrow (1874-1957) who was born in the small Texas town of Palmer in Ellis County.
Cumie and Henry Barrow would give birth to My 13th cousin, Clyde Chestnut Barrow in Telico, Ellis County, Texas on March 24th 1909.
His parents and siblings would move from this small farm town in the early 1900s while Clyde was just a young boy of 9 year old when the farmland they owned ceased to be profitable and moved to Dallas, settling in an impoverished area of the city with other "less fortunates".
Here Henry and Cumi would raise their family, first in a "homeless-squatters camp" under a viaduct.... and later they would build a small house and attach a gas station and small store to the front in West Dallas.
And it is here that Clyde would grow up and find his way into petty theft and eventually strong arm robbery. The rest as they say is history and it is this history that "The Dallas Morning News" highlighted in the article below....
Clyde would live until May 23rd, 1934...dying at the young age of 25 years old after a shootout with law enforcement that would capture the attention of the nation.
His memory would live on forever in the saga of "Bonnie and Clyde".
Following is the story of my ancestral cousin's boyhood home in Dallas that is now owned by a real estate company who wants nothing more than to build up it's portfolio of mixed use development in the growing and forever changing landscape of Dallas & Fort Worth Texas......
The following story is taken in part from an article in "The Dallas Morning News"....
Clyde Barrow’s still-standing home in West Dallas represents more than infamous killers in love....
The Barrow gas station is a reminder that the groundwork for West Dallas’ challenges was laid a long time ago.
The Barrow family's service station -- and residence in the above photo -- was on Eagle Ford Road, later renamed Singleton Boulevard.
The property, at 1221 Singleton Ave., was just bought by the owners of Sylvan Thirty.
{Sylvan Thirty is a Mixed Use Development Company}
For years now, the decaying former gas station has languished at the corner of Singleton Boulevard and Borger Street in West Dallas. The paint has changed, but little else.
But recent news that the old Barrow family filling station has been sold is casting a different light on the run-down building -- and has prompted the city’s Landmark Commission to take a closer look at its future.
Should the building disappear into the new construction snaking its way down Singleton, more will be lost than the history of Clyde Barrow’s and Bonnie Parker’s violent two-year crime spree.
Some of the most poignant and ignored history of West Dallas — the poverty and neglect of its early years — would be vanquished with it. “Progress” would erase a reminder that the groundwork for West Dallas’ continuing economic challenges was laid a long time ago.
The old Star station and another threatened West Dallas landmark, the site of a Barrow murder three blocks away, date to the early 1930s. But the story starts in 1922, when Henry and Cumie Barrow and their three youngest children moved to Dallas.......
Part 2
The Barrow Clan Moves To Dallas
"1922"
Like so many Texas farmers, the Barrows were unable to make a living when cotton and food prices crashed after World War I. They packed what little they had in their horse-drawn wagon and followed their older children to the big city.
But Dallas — echoing Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent stance toward refugees — didn’t want these out-of-towners. Flora Saylor, who ran the United Charities in town, tried to send some “transients” back where they came from. She complained several times to The Dallas Morning News about hungry families, widows with small children and older people who asked for help in the early 1920s.
“There is a continuous stream of needy people coming into the city from the outside,” she said. “Families arrive in the city without forethought for themselves, without funds, without food or clothing or any preparation for a place to lay their heads.”
Back row (from left): Billie Jean Parker, Clyde Barrow, Cumie Barrow, and L.C. Barrow. Front row: Marie Barrow, Emma Parker, and Bonnie Parker.
A Barrow family gathering in West Dallas in the Trinity River bottom. Clyde Barrow is second from the left in the top row. (Photo: Buddy Barrow)
‘Free campground’ AKA "Cement City"
The Barrows were among them, and initially joined other newcomers under what is now the Houston Street Viaduct.
Unwanted in the city, these destitute “itinerants” were often urged to settle in a “free campground” in West Dallas, an unincorporated and untended area of Dallas County that was poor by design.
Henry and Cumie, along with 4-year-old Marie, 9-year-old L.C. and Clyde, on the edge of his teen years, joined a few dozen other families there. At first, they lived in tents, gradually building shelter with leftovers from Henry’s meager work as a scrap dealer.
Just across the Trinity River, the new Magnolia Building was opening, joining the Majestic Theatre, built in 1921. But West Dallas had no running water and no electricity. Streets were unpaved.
Money and food were scarce and the families there relied on bread and sometimes bologna sandwiches brought by kind donors. Whites, Mexican immigrants and African Americans lived as neighbors, in sharp contrast to a segregated Dallas.
The area was an environmental nightmare, with several waste dumps. Cement plans spewed acrid smoke. Oil refineries and chemical plants operated open-air lagoons. So much sewage poured into the Trinity that a 1925 State Board of Health report said it “presents the suggestion of some mythological river of death.”
Dallas Morning News Article
COMMENTARY
Preservation or progress? Link to Bonnie and Clyde makes West Dallas gas station a center of debate
BY ROBERT WILONSKY
During his family’s early years in West Dallas, Clyde Barrow lived off-and-on with an uncle near Corsicana. By the mid-1920s, he had given up on school and worked in a series of manufacturing jobs, often staying with an older sister in Dallas. His parents moved into a small hand-built home away from the campground, joining perhaps a few thousand permanent West Dallas residents.
Clyde’s early crimes, it appears, involved stealing metal his father could resell. By the later 1920s, Clyde was eager to make more money and win over girlfriends, and he made a terrible career choice: He graduated to a side business of burglary and stealing cars.
Dallas police regularly went to his job to pick him up and take him downtown for questioning. They would try to bully him into confessing, but never charged him. “After he was picked up so many times he came to have a hatred for the law, and figured it didn’t do much, if any, good to try to do right,” his mother wrote later in an unpublished manuscript.
Undeterred, Clyde took his trade to Waco and other Texas towns.
Clyde meets Bonnie
In January 1930, Clyde met Bonnie Parker at her brother and sister-in-law’s home. The attraction was swift and mutual.
Parker was a petite and vivacious 19-year-old with a flair for drama. Her family had moved to West Dallas after her father died when she was young. She had been a good student: In 1922, when she was 11, she won a countywide junior spelling competition; that win helped her West Dallas team upset Highland Park in the Dallas County interscholastic literary contest.
Young women had few opportunities in West Dallas and most married young. Just before she turned 16, Parker wed her high school heartthrob Roy Thornton. Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t go well.
By the time she met Clyde, Bonnie had separated from her husband. Thornton ended up in prison; she never divorced him but dropped his name.
Just a few weeks into the romance, Dallas police arrested Clyde at Bonnie’s family home. It was an unusual start to an unusual love affair.
Prison changed Clyde
Clyde was swiftly convicted in Waco for burglary and car theft and sentenced to state prison. The brutal conditions and abuse from guards and other inmates hardened him, changing him, according to one friend, from “a schoolboy to a rattlesnake.”
While Clyde was away, the Barrow family took a step up. One of the older children bought land on Eagle Ford Road, now Singleton. The small house, just bedrooms and a kitchen area, was loaded on a truck and moved to the property. Gas pumps were added, along with a front room for selling soft drinks and snacks and maybe bootleg liquor.
The family also sold water from a well on the property. An outhouse in the back substituted for indoor plumbing.
By now, the nation was deep into the Great Depression. The population of West Dallas swelled, but the Dallas ISD closed the only high school in West Dallas in the early 1930s, requiring area kids to travel miles to get a high school diploma.
Clyde spent nearly two years in prison, winning parole in early 1932. Among his first stops back home was Bonnie Parker’s. Quickly, they were a couple again.
Family members say Clyde tried to straighten up and go back to work. But if so, he didn’t try very hard. Within a matter of weeks, he was committing armed robbery again.
His robberies of stores and a few banks and his reputation for being quick to shoot terrified many. But he also won a following at a time when many Americans were angry at and distrustful of banks, government and police.
Robbery turns to Murder
By the end of 1932, Clyde and his companions were tied to four murders, including that of an Oklahoma deputy sheriff.
Only one of his major crimes was in Dallas. In January 1933, a West Dallas companion, Raymond Hamilton, was in jail and Clyde was trying to bust him out. Clyde visited one of Hamilton’s sisters, who lived just blocks from the family filling station, to chat about it. But on the night he showed up, five officers, including three from Tarrant County, were inside the house, hoping to catch a bank robber they thought might stop by.
Clyde knocked, with a sawed-off shotgun hidden under his coat. When one of Hamilton’s sisters opened the door, Clyde saw the officers and sent a round through the front window. The officers returned fire.
In the melee, Clyde shot Tarrant County Deputy Sheriff Malcolm Davis at close range. Davis, a quiet man known for his catfish dinners, died on the way to the hospital.
News stories of the killing noted for the first time that Clyde had a tough girlfriend who traveled with him.
The so-called McBride house still stands, vacant and unsafe, on North Winnetka Avenue. The owner, the Wesley-Rankin Community Center, doesn’t need it and would like to see it restored and moved elsewhere.
The center is named for Hattie Rankin Moore, a church volunteer who committed to helping the neighborhood beginning in 1935. She saw a reason why young men there turned to crime. “We have no parks, no playgrounds, no handy schools, no lights, no water, no gas,” Rankin Moore once said of West Dallas. “The dogs in Dallas are housed better than our boys and girls.”
The trouble that Clyde and Buck Barrow and Raymond Hamilton caused led many outside West Dallas to label it as unruly and dangerous. But, in fact, it was a tight-knit community where people didn’t bother to lock their doors.
“You didn’t have anything to steal and nobody would take it from you anyway,” Eddie Shores, who grew up in West Dallas, told The News’ Rena Pederson in 1976. There might not be food in your house, he said, “but if your neighbor had a pot of beans going, you knew you could get a bite to eat.”
That loyalty — and maybe some cash — helped protect the Barrow gang. Law enforcement complained that people in West Dallas turned silent after the Davis murder. The Dallas Dispatch, a morning paper, even suggested that Clyde and his girlfriend were “modern ‘Robin Hoods,’” helping their hungry neighbors with food and clothing.
That was probably an exaggeration, but the couple was known to leave decent sums of stolen money with Cumie Barrow, who may have used it to help (and also silence) locals and possibly poorly paid law enforcement, too.
In the famous poem that ran right after their death, Bonnie noted the special relationship the community had:
From Irving to West Dallas viaduct
Is known as the Great Divide,
Where the women are kin,
And the men are men,
And they won’t “stool” on Bonnie and Clyde
After the Davis murder, Clyde and Bonnie spent most of their time on the road but swung through West Dallas regularly to see the families they loved dearly. Sometimes, they threw soda bottles in front of the filling station with instructions inside detailing where to meet.
As their situation grew more dire, Cumie noted their visits on the wall of the tiny house, recording at least seven in February and March 1934. There wouldn’t be many more: The couple was killed in an ambush near Gibsland, La., on May 23, 1934.
Life for the Barrows after Clyde and Bonnie's Death
A few years later, an angry rival of L.C. Barrow fired shots into the house, hitting Cumie. She recovered but lost her vision in one eye.
In 1940, she and Henry moved into a home with indoor plumbing for the first time. She died in 1942, and he died in 1957.
West Dallas finally got running water and electricity in the early 1950s, after it was annexed by the city of Dallas.
Will History Be Saved?
What will happen to the old station isn’t clear. It has been bricked over and changed over the years, though it’s easy to walk around the property today and imagine the outhouse, the well and the regular visitors.
The Dallas Landmark Commission has notified the new owner, Oaxaca Interests, that it has an interest in preserving it. At its March meeting, the commission will consider starting a two-year study of whether it deserves a historic designation. The Wesley-Rankin Center is investigating options for the McBride house, including demolition, if it can’t find someone to move and repair it.
If neither can be saved, one hopes Dallas will somehow preserve some of the story — not just of two outlaws in love, whose unforgivable choices captured the imagination of a depressed nation, but also of the city and the conditions that helped launch them in the first place.
Karen Blumenthal is the author of Bonnie and Clyde: The Making of a Legend, from which this article was adapted for The Dallas Morning News.
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