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.
When I think of wide-open spaces and my family, I don’t think of mountains, hiking trails, prairies, or canyons because my family has never been adventurers or campers. But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t explored. We have just in a different way. My family has always been people who found our own kind of open space. For us wide open spaces have always meant possibility.
That possibility started with my grandmother, Gladys Denson Mays. As a young woman in the segregated south during the 1930s, she made the decision that education was important to her. So important in fact that she went as far in school as she could in our hometown, the 9th grade, graduating as valedictorian of her class. But still she wanted more, and at the age of 14 she moved just over 90 miles to go the closest Black high school, Dunbar High school, in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was a teenager all alone in a new town creating a space for herself as an educated Black woman at a time when both her race and her gender were seen limitations.
My grandmother created opportunity where there was little. She expanded what was possible, not just for herself, but for her family and her community. She created a legacy that continues to this day. Her life and accomplishments continue to remind me that open spaces don’t always come to you – you sometimes have to carve out the space you want to be in.
Journey Through the Generations 
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