My mother's parents divorced when she was six years old. After the divorce, my mother had little contact with her father, and he passed away six years later. She knew essentially nothing about the paternal side of her family, and out of her curiosity came my laborious and determined search for our roots.

Over the years, I have spent many happy hours in libraries full of census records, court records, land records and local history books. This research made these long ago relatives come alive to me.

I came to realize early in my search, that every name I encountered was not just a name, but a person who had loved, labored and made a life for themselves. From each of those names had come a small part of me.

One evening, my mother and I were going over my most recently discovered treasures. Those portraits from that bedroom wall came back into my mind, and I asked my mother who they were. "Those are my grandparents," she replied. I was stunned. Not mother and son, but husband and wife.

My mother told me she remembered her grandfather clearly, as a tall man with a head and face of snowy white hair, who would walk down from his mountaintop home daily. She recalled being in awe of him even as a teenager. However, she didn't remember her grandmother, who had died twenty-three years before my mother was born.

This woman, my great-grandmother, was born in a time and place that was cruel to everyone, but especially to women. She was married at 15. By the time she was 21, she had given birth to her third son. At 39, she had been married 24 years, given birth to ten children, and died. No wonder she looked like her husband's mother.

Life for these Alabama dirt farmers was extremely difficult. They barely created a life from land that was unkind to them, and a woman who had delivered six sons in eleven years had an extremely hard time of things.

There were none of the modern conveniences that we take for granted today. No running water, no electricity, no stove for preparing meals, no modern form of birth control. This woman did her family's washing by hand, sewed their clothes by candlelight, brought water from the well for cooking and cleaning, and then prepared meals over an open fire. She spent almost 8 years of her short life carrying one of the ten children she presented approximately every two years. She did not have the blessing of a girl child to help her with her weary travels until her seventh time in child bed. I imagine by the time this daughter came into the world, her mother was too exhausted and fatigued to welcome her with more than a smile.

I can't say why this woman, of all the women I've encountered in my search, has affected me. Do I, a woman of modern advantages, feel pity for her? My answer would most definitely be a resounding yes. She toiled and struggled all her life and left no legacy except in the eyes of those ten babies she left behind.

But through those eyes, come a small part of mine. Through her encounter with life comes some of the ease that I have in my life today. Thanks to her and countless others just like her, the women of today have a better life.

When I think of her, I think of my life with its ease and comfort. I think of the choices I am free to make everyday. I've never had to sew my family's clothing; I buy them off the rack. I turn on the faucet and receive all the hot and cold running water I need. I choose to cook our evening meal or call for a pizza delivery. Well into the night, I can obtain light through the flip of a switch; and I chose the number of children I wanted -- or could afford -- through the miracles of modern medicine. She didn't have any of these choices. I wish she could have lived to be an old woman with a head of snowy white hair.

My mother and I will be traveling to the hills of northeast Alabama again this summer. Somewhere, on some back road, is a small country cemetery that I have never visited. I plan on stopping in this summer, locating a particular headstone, standing in silence for a few moments, and saying, "Thank you, Annie Jane, for being." Maybe somehow she'll hear me, smile, and reply, "You're welcome."