Newberry, Joan Esther Broadway , 1884-1945.

Born in 1884 in Center Ridge, Conway County, Arkansas, Joan Esther Broadaway, known as Esther, was the thirteenth and last child of Reverend James Knox Broadaway, Jr., and Rebecca Ann Holmes. These two pioneering families had migrated from Wayne County, Tennessee, to Conway County, Arkansas, in the late 1840s. When Esther's parents married in Dover, Pope County, Arkansas, in 1859, her father was eighteen years old and her mother was seventeen. The American agrarian dream for men like James required large families in order to operate and sustain enterprises of farming and logging. James later became an ordained Baptist minister, but this avocation probably was unprofitable except for the religious experience and the occasional gifts of food. Despite their hardships, James and Rebecca seem to have had a healthy and vigorous life together. Both died in 1916, after a marriage of fifty-seven years. Rebecca had done her part by producing the "Baker's Dozen" of children, almost one every other year until Esther was born in 1884, when Rebecca was forty-two. Esther Newberry's life was very different from her mother's pioneer womanhood. After having studied music at Arkansas Baptist College in Conway, Faulkner County, Arkansas, she was married in 1904 at the age of twenty to Maxel Hardy Newberry, also from Center Ridge. Esther did not emulate her mother's childbearing achievements. Her first child, Jarrel, was not born until she was thirty-three years old. A daughter, Rebecca, was born seven years later near Esther's fortieth birthday. Esther worked outside the home with her husband. One venture was a traveling-tent photography studio in the Conway County area. She later worked with Max as he tried other prospects ranging from row crops to livestock to operating a service station and cafe. Esther and Max left Center Ridge in 1914, around the time of her parents' deaths, and lived in Prairie County, Arkansas until migrating to California in 1944. They settled in San Pedro, where their son and daughter lived, and where Esther, at age sixty-one, died suddenly from a pancreatic infection. She was buried in Gardena, California.