52 Ancestors Challenge Week 4

For several years fellow blogger Amy Johnson Crow has been running a genealogy challenge that has seen increased popularity in the last couple years. Over on WikiTree, they have decided to pick up this challenge and issue a weekly open-ended prompt on the message boards. Each prompt is designed for members to discuss and respond with an ancestor or story that fits with that week’s prompt. In addition to answering over on WikiTree's G2G forum, I'll also be answering here in a more complete form.

This weeks’ theme is "I'd like to meet".
My beautiful grandmother, Harper Edwards, is the person I would most like to meet out of my ancestors.

     While she died several decades before I was born, Harper was probably the earliest figure who sparked my interest in my family’s history. Known in our family simply as “Ma Gray,” when my father passed away, I realized I’d never learned what her true name was and there was almost no one available I could ask about these things.
     After my father’s death, I began searching for who exactly this mystery woman was that my father spoke of so highly.
     Born in northeast Texas in 1894, Harper was the 8th of 11 children. Her family moved from the Clarksville area to McCulloch County, Texas where she married my grandfather, Washington Gray. Together they would have ten children over the next 24 years.
     For most of her life, Harper was a dutiful wife and mother. After her husband’s untimely death in 1939, Harper was left to raise their younger children as a single mother. She entered the workforce and eventually moved to El Paso around 1955 where she worked as a nurse’s aide until her death in 1963.
- Patricia

Gray's Genealogy