52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge

I have decided to jump in and take the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge started by blogger Amy Johnson Crow.  I have been thinking about this challenge since the beginning of the year as I definitely have 52 ancestors and many more to honor through this forum.  Genealogy and Family History is very personal for me.  I find it to be very therapeutic in nature for me since I did not grow up in the traditional sense.  My genealogy quest is a way for me to find out more about the people who came before me in hopes of understanding their lives from a different perspective. So, with all the many fascinating people in my family history, I decided to approach this writing and research challenge similar to how you start your genealogy research and start with your parents.  So my first entry will be about my mother Iva Mae Brantley.

My mother Iva, who I am affectionately named for, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1950 to Dorothy Vann, my grandmother and grandfather Ivan Brantley.  Sadly, I never got to know my mother because she died several hours after I was born in 1975.  My father Billy Jackson, her husband, felt as though he was not capable of taking care of me so entrusted me to friends and family.  When I was four years old, my Aunt Cathy, my fathers sister, took me in and raised me until I was seventeen.  I grew up knowing I had a half sister named Chuggy from my mother, but I knew very little about my mother’s side of the family.

Until recently, I didn’t even know my grandmother’s maiden name(Vann) until I got in contact with my uncle who gave me some great leads on my Brantley and Vann side.  My mother’s kin is from the Oklahoma area and were part of the Five Civilized Tribes.  The information that I got from my Uncle was amazing and it lead me to a world of information that I had never known about my history.  I had no idea that Native American’s owned slaves and I have now become engrossed in learning their history and excited to tell their stories.  My genealogy quest has been such a learning experience into things about history that I am embarrassed that I did not already know more about.

I have one picture of my mother with my half sister below and this was taken December 1971 and my mother would have been twenty one years old and Chuggy would have been six years old at the time.  I love this picture and every time I look at it I see that I have her eyes and her hands.

My mother Iva Mae Brantley and half sister Chuggy

Some of the things that I know about my mother are, she was a short woman in stature, a great friend to my Aunt Cathy, a nice woman but who could be tough when she needed to and everyone loved being around her.  I am told that my mother worked at the Kansas City juvenile detention center and had to deal a lot with troubled teens.  I also know my mother had to have had her own troubles as a teen as she had my half sister at fourteen years old. My mother also had another daughter a year later who she gave up for adoption at the age of fifteen.  All I know of this other daughter is that my mother had named her Gidget.  Two kids by the time you were 15, makes me wonder what could have possibly been going on in her life.  However, my mother did get it together by the time she had me because she was 24 and married and had a good job and was well respected by family and friends.  As an adult now who is reflecting back on my own life and I have lived 14 years longer than my mother, I know that there must have been some turbulence in her early life as I know that being a teenager is not easy.

Part of my genealogy quest will be to get to know more about my Vann’s and Brantley branches and get to know the people who knew my mother for the short time that she was here and honor her memory in every possible way that I can.  I also hope this forum will lead me to connecting with family I have never known.

IJK