Jim Jones was born in Crete, Indiana, a rural unincorporated community in Randolph County near the Ohio border,[1] to James Thurman Jones (May 31, 1887 – May 29, 1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (April 16, 1902 – December 11, 1977).[2] He would later claim part Cherokee descent through his mother, though this was likely false.[3][note 1] Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to nearby Lynn, Indiana in 1934.[4] Jim Jones and a childhood friend both claimed that Jones' father was in the Ku Klux Klan.[4]
In interviews for the 2007 documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, childhood acquaintances recalled Jones as being a "really weird kid" who was "obsessed with religion ... obsessed with death", and claimed that he frequently held funerals for small animals, and had purportedly fatally stabbed a cat.[5]
Jones was a voracious reader as a child and studied Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler carefully,[6] noting each of their strengths and weaknesses.[6] After Jones' parents separated, he moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana.[7] Jones graduated from Richmond High School early and with honors in December 1948.[8]
Jones married Marceline Baldwin, a nurse, in 1949 and moved to Bloomington, Indiana.[9] Jones attended Indiana University at Bloomington, where a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt about the plight of African Americans impressed him.[9] Jones' sympathetic statements about communism offended Marceline's grandmother.[9] In 1951, Jones moved to Indianapolis, where he attended night school at Butler University, earning a degree in secondary education in 1961.[10]
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