Sylvia Harrod Blackwell's memoir. These stories are for my family, big and little. Far and near. I write them so that you may know and honor the lives of ancestors who came before you.Impressive is the history of ancestors who labored long and hard raising families before the Civil War, and during the years of the Reconstruction Era, the black codes and Jim Crow, the years of the Great Depression, and World War I and II-always making a way out of no way.They came from Delaware, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Virginia. Oral stories tell of my paternal grandmother, Louisa King, whose ancestral home was Sierra Leone.