Tuesday, July 9, 2019

52 Ancestors - REUNION: Newtown Neighborhood


 I thought I had nothing new to say about “reunions” until I remembered a reunion my parents attended in 1980. It was a neighborhood reunion, but not just any neighborhood. It was a reunion of anyone who ever lived in the neighborhood known as Newtown, a neighborhood that no longer exists, nor did it exist when 450 former Newtowners came together to reminisce about the good ol’ days.


Newtown was where my dad grew up. It was located between downtown Portsmouth and the shipyard. Two wars brought an eclectic blend of workers and military personnel that resulted in a vibrant neighborhood of Catholics and Baptists, Irish and Poles and Italians. Row houses sprang up as did plenty of grocery stores, bakeries, cleaners, and shoe shops, all with apartments above.

A curious mix of decay and progress came together to wipe out Newtown altogether, except in the minds of those who remembered the good times. 
Newtown before and after https://jollettetc.blogspot.com
Photo courtesy of Harvey T. Siegel
Two poems written by some of the reunion-goers capture the life in Newtown much better than I can paraphrase it.





Amy Johnson Crow continues to challenge genealogy bloggers and non-bloggers alike to think about our ancestors and share a story or photo about them. The challenge is “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.

Wendy
© 2019, Wendy Mathias. All rights reserved.

4 comments:

  1. Its a shame Newtown "died" off. It does sound by reading those poems that it was a great place to live and raise a family.

    betty

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  2. Oh my goodness...and how great all those people came back to share their memories of a place again!

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  3. I love this! My family is so small we never held reunions - heck, we could have all fit at the dining room table. I wonder if somewhere along the line there was some sort of neighborhood reunion. I'm struggling with this weeks' prompt. :-(

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  4. Love this post! I returned last week from a reunion of the street where I grew up, which was ravaged by two Susquehanna River floods. No one lives on the street anymore, and many nearby houses have been torn down, but just as with Newtown, our memories of good times there persist even after the physical evidence is gone.

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