James Warren Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in a rural area of Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones, a World WarI veteran, and Lynetta Putnam. Jones was of Irish and Welsh descent; he later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, but his maternal second cousin said this was untrue. In 1934, the economic difficulties during the Great Depression forced the family to move to the nearby town of Lynn, where Jones grew up in a shack without plumbing.