52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2025 – Week 8: Migration

NOTE: I accepted the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge headed by fellow genealogy blogger Amy Johnson Crow. The idea behind this challenge is that you will receive email prompts, a word or phrase, every week, and you find something about your research or family history to write about.  Click HERE to read my first 52 Ancestors blog post in 2019.

I learned about the Great Migration in school. I have seen documentaries and read stories about it all my life. But I never really thought about how it was included in my family until I started this research journey as an adult. Growing up I had family from both sides that would travel back down south every summer to visit from Chicago, St. Louis, and Michigan. But it never dawned on me that they were part of the Great Migration.

The Great Migration was a period of mass migrations of African Americans from the rural south to urban areas in the north, midwest, and west United States from 1910 – 1970. One of the main reasons that so many African Americans moved from the south to northern states was to escape the oppressive racial environment and Jim Crow segregation. There was also an industrial boom in northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia creating better paying jobs than in the south where sharecropping was some of the only work at the time.

In 2017 I decided to make time to interview my oldest living relative, Bertha Wright Balentine. My son, mother, and I made the trip to Chicago, making it three generations of Wright’s on a family history adventure. We spent one evening at my Aunt Bert’s daughter’s house sitting around the dinner table just talking about her life, her high school days, her first days in Chicago, going through pictures and funeral programs, and going down memory lane. I learned a lot about her, my family, my mom, and left with some genealogy gems that I would have never known if I hadn’t talked with my Aunt Bert. After that trip, Aunt Bert and I stayed in regular contact with weekly phone calls and letters. She would send me family pictures when she ran across them and call to tell me stories of her youth.

One of the stories she told me was about her first few weeks in Chicago in 1955. She said that she had wanted a change. She had grown up in rural Grays, Arkansas and wanted to see more of the world. She graduated high school in 1953. She and her sister, Louise, decided to make the move to the big city of Chicago in 1955. She told me that she had only been in Chicago two weeks when Emmett Till was brought back to Chicago after his lynching in Mississippi in August of 1955. She said she went to the public viewing, but couldn’t make herself go in. So she just stood outside while others went in. She said it was at that moment that she knew that getting out of the south and moving to Chicago was the best decision.

She told me the next 20 years was a revolving door of relatives from the south moving to Chicago. Her house was always their first stop. They would stay with her while they looked for work. She said that she was able to make a better life for herself, send money back home to her grandmother and family, and she met her husband shortly after moving to Chicago. She was able to travel back down south whenever she wanted to visit and would occasionally convince her grandmother and cousins to visit her.

Growing up and reading about the Great Migration, I never thought I would hear a personal story from someone in my family. This is why I love family history, finding my family story within America’s history is so powerful.

Click HERE to read more about my trip to Chicago in 2017