New York City is the place where James Burkett arrived under the name James Barber and quickly acquired a criminal record marked by serious violence. In Andrew Barber’s reconstruction of his family’s past, the city is more than a destination: it is where an obscure and partly conjectural origin story meets surviving documents, including a dated photograph and a court report, and where the family’s history of violence first becomes visible in the record.

Arrival and change of identity

The account places James Burkett’s birth near Minot, North Dakota, around 1890, but says little is known about his childhood or family. As Andrew understood the story, Burkett left North Dakota to escape an armed-robbery charge, spent time on the southern shore of Lake Superior working around fishing boats, and eventually made his way east. The reasons for the journey and the exact circumstances remain uncertain: the family could not establish whether he changed his name to evade arrest or to begin a new life, nor why he chose Barber as his surname.

A surviving studio photograph gives the arrival story its firmest point of reference. Taken in New York City at the H.W. Harrison Photographic Studio on Fulton Street on August 23, 1911, it is the only image of Burkett-Barber that Andrew ever saw. The date and the new name, James Barber, were written on its back. The photograph shows a young man, about twenty or twenty-one, in a borrowed coat with a bowler hat tucked under his arm. Its documentary details establish his presence in the city, while leaving the story of how he got there unresolved.

A criminal record in the city

New York City is also where James Barber’s criminal history appears to begin in surviving records. His first known New York State arrest came in 1912. The charges that followed included assault, assault with intent to rob, assault with intent to murder, mayhem, possession of an infernal device, possession of an unlicensed firearm, rape, and attempted murder. Between that first arrest and his death in 1941, Barber spent nearly half his life in prison or awaiting trial; sentences for rape and attempted murder alone totaled fourteen years.

Andrew reads the speed and severity of this record as evidence that Barber entered New York already practiced in violence, rather than working his way up from minor offenses. He further suspects that the charge Burkett had fled in North Dakota was more serious than armed robbery, reasoning that the journey and change of identity seemed disproportionate to a minor stickup charge. That conclusion is Andrew’s inference, not a fact established by the documents: the original charge remains unknown.

The Brooklyn case and the limits of the record

A court report supplies one specific account of Barber’s violence in the city. In 1916, at a Brooklyn bar, he became embroiled in an argument with a man named Payton over a debt. The court record gives competing accounts of whose debt it was: Barber’s, or that of someone for whom he worked as a debt collector. The dispute escalated into an assault with a bottle and continued after the encounter moved from the bar into the street, until bystanders intervened and held Barber for the police.

The case produced an appeal that was summarized in New York’s case reports in 1918. Its brief legal account records not only the assault but also the judge’s observation that Barber’s reputation for violence was well known to Payton and more generally. The report offers a narrow, official glimpse of a life otherwise reconstructed from scattered traces. It supports the conclusion that Barber was already notorious in New York, but cannot answer the larger questions about his earlier life, the motive for his new name, or the full circumstances of his departure from North Dakota.

Narrative significance

The city marks the point at which family memory gives way, however incompletely, to public evidence. The photograph fixes a date, an address, and an adopted name; the arrest history and court report establish the persistence and seriousness of Barber’s offenses. Yet these records do not turn the family story into certainty. Andrew’s account carefully distinguishes what the documents show from what he infers, making New York City both the setting of Barber’s recorded criminal life and a boundary around what can be known of its origins.