The Newell Nine

My family name has an old claim to fame – my great grandfather was one of the very few all brothers baseball teams in the country.  The Newell Nine played in the 1920s and 1930s out of Plankington, SD.  The family had 16 children – 12 boys and 4 girls.  The second youngest boy died at the age of 6, but the other 11 were active ball players (the youngest was generally considered the mascot).  My dad made some mention of this as we were growing up, and then we found more when my Uncle Darrel started digging further into our ancestry several years ago.  He made a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame to find their information, and since I repeated that trip earlier this week – I now have the info.

There are three newspaper articles in the Hall of Fame plus one picture and 2 letters written by relatives that explained the newspaper articles.  One of the original articles in quoted completely in one of the later articles, so I’ll just post the 2 unique articles in a separate post.

The scan of the big picture from the Hall of Fame didn’t come out very well, so I’ll try to re-scan that and upload it here as well.

My ancestor is Ben – his full name was Benona and his nickname was Jim.  He was the catcher on the baseball team.  My dad didn’t get to spend too much time with him – he was actually there when he died.  He collapsed in the bathroom when my dad was 7 or 8 and dad ran to call for help.