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I am curious about the upbringing of a maternal great grandmother. I had been told that she was an abusive parent, a very abusive parent, towards grandpa. I know that she did not go past 5th grade and that she was married twice, though she was born in the 1900s (circa 1903-1906 from what I have seen, though there is not a specified birth year, it seems to change based upon the census record. She died in 1967) so her not going past 5th grade may have been more a sign of the times. I don’t know enough about what she did after she stopped going to school, about expectations of her, about her thought patterns. That’s what I seek to know about many family members, especially since we are black people. I’m just as curious about personalities and life experiences as I am about how they looked. I care just as much about anecdotes and others’ memories of them. I wonder how they fit into a community, how others regarded them. I wonder how grandpa’s dad felt about his mother’s parenting - if it didn’t concern him, if it was normal to him. I never sensed it was something they argued about. But I could be wrong.

My grandfather had apparently suggested that her favorite child between the two of them was his older brother, because his older brother had light skin and hair that was wavy. My grandfather outlived the favored brother by multiple decades.

My maternal grandfather had told my mother that she beat him a fair amount and that she favored his brother because his brother had lighter skin and wavy hair. Her husband, from the one poor quality photograph I have seen of him, was very lightskinned, though he was black (an early census record lists him as “mulatto” though I know the census takers tended to guess it.) It was apparent when I looked at another census record that she had siblings. It is noted in the 1930s census record that she consistently “kept house” over the years in Mississippi, where both she and her second husband (my great grandfather) had grown up (my great grandfather is definitely listed as having grown up there, and that is where they raised their kids.) What I find interesting about her having kept house is the fact that it seems they could not actually afford it - my grandpa, born in 1942 (I know they did not want him) had said he grew up without indoor plumbing, in a home wherein he had 6+ siblings. However, she is never listed as working in spite of this. It is noted that she could indeed read and write. My grandfather had said when I asked about her over the phone ten years ago that she was “strict.” I had seen in a photo of her second husband (great grandpa) that he was overweight.

My grandpa had told my mother that my great grandmother “slept with” white men/had “affairs” with them, and engaged in prostitution with them. He said that men used to give her gifts.

I saw in the census records that her first of two marriages was at the age of seventeen (but as I said. It’s hard to find her specific age.)

I saw pictures of her for the first time recently. It is difficult to gauge the time frame of the picture, though I suspect that she was in her thirties, and she looks average to me there, it does not appear when looking at her face that she was “thin” (though it wouldn’t be surprising if she had simply gained weight as a result of multiple births/having multiple children. She bears a serious expression in the photograph.

She was apparently religious, it seems. One of my cousins has her Bible.

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