The History of the Walker Family and the Times They Lived is a genealogy study into the families that have married into the Drake family. This study is based on the families that married into the Bettie Eileen Walker Drake family. This study includes the marriage of Merrill Clayton Drake to Bettie Eileen Walker. The Walker family study traces their ancestry back to their origin in England. The study takes into consideration the hardships they faced in migrating from England to the Virginia Colony. This book attempts to report the immigration of the Walker families and identifies the ships that they sailed on to immigrate to America. It describes world events that occurred during their lifetimes that had an effect on their existence. The study was developed from family data available to the author. It includes war records for selected individuals drafted into World War II and other wars starting with the American Revolution. This study is a dedication to my family.

This history takes factual information provided by encyclopedias and other historical documents. Other reference material includes birth certificates, death certificates and census data which support the factual basis of this history. The war records and military history of individuals and their family members were also used in the determination of their contributions to the society in which they lived. Other research material included Wikipedia, Ancetry.com, wikitree.com, genealogy.com family bibles and my many brothers and sisters. Two directions of ancestry history were investigated to gain the most effective approach to the design of this history. First the genealogy of Amye Grenville was traced to her origin of Charlemagne. Her marriage to John Drake VI allowed further investigation into his ancestry. Both were thoroughly pursued with vigor to determine their origins over the last 1300 years. The investigation provided by Earl Drake combined with my efforts has provided this history for your enjoyment.

Soon to be a Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, On Her Own Ground is the first full-scale biography of “one of the great success stories of American history” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Madam C.J. Walker—the legendary African American entrepreneur and philanthropist—by her great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles. The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Sarah Breedlove—who would become known as Madam C. J. Walker—was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty. She spent the better part of the next two decades laboring as a washerwoman for $1.50 a week. Then—with the discovery of a revolutionary hair care formula for black women—everything changed. By her death in 1919, Walker managed to overcome astonishing odds: building a storied beauty empire from the ground up, amassing wealth unprecedented among black women, and devoting her life to philanthropy and social activism. Along the way, she formed friendships with great early-twentieth-century political figures such as Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.

What was it like for a mother to flee slavery, leaving her children behind? To Free a Family tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years trying to recover her family. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price—remorse at parting without a word, fear for her family’s fate. This story is anchored in two extraordinary collections of letters and diaries, that of her former North Carolina slaveholders and that of the northern family—Susan and Peter Lesley—who protected and employed her. Sydney Nathans’s sensitive and penetrating narrative reveals Mary Walker’s remarkable persistence as well as the sustained collaboration of black and white abolitionists who assisted her. Mary Walker and the Lesleys ventured half a dozen attempts at liberation, from ransom to ruse to rescue, until the end of the Civil War reunited Mary Walker with her son and daughter. Unlike her more famous counterparts—Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth—who wrote their own narratives and whose public defiance made them heroines, Mary Walker’s efforts were protracted, wrenching, and private. Her odyssey was more representative of women refugees from bondage who labored secretly and behind the scenes to reclaim their families from the South. In recreating Mary Walker’s journey, To Free a Family gives voice to their hidden epic of emancipation and to an untold story of the Civil War era.