The Rosa Parks family tree, from Pine Level to Detroit

Rosa Parks spent much of her childhood with her mother’s parents at Pine Level, a small town in the southeast of Montgomery County, Alabama.¹ Their farm had fruit, pecan and walnut trees, chickens and cows.³ Wikipedia records that Sylvester Edwards was the child of an enslaved woman and the son of a plantation owner.³

Her first name joins the names of her two grandmothers, Rose and Louisa.³ On her father’s side, the Library of Congress holds a photograph from her papers catalogued as her paternal grandfather, Anderson McCauley.⁵ He is not drawn, as no source read here gives his dates or his wife’s surname.

James McCauley was a carpenter and stonemason, and Leona Edwards was a teacher.¹ Wikipedia adds that he came from Abbeville, Alabama, and that she came from Pine Level and taught during the week at nearby Spring Hill.³ Their daughter, Rosa Louise McCauley, was born at Tuskegee, Alabama, on 4 February 1913.¹

After her birth the family lived for a time with his relatives in Abbeville. His work kept him away, and Leona took Rosa to live with her own parents at Pine Level.³ Rosa’s younger brother was Sylvester McCauley.³

Rosa began school at an all-Black school in Pine Level, where one teacher taught fifty pupils. In 1924, aged eleven, she enrolled at the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, and illness in the family made her leave school at sixteen.¹ The National Women’s History Museum records that she later attended the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes and withdrew when her grandmother became ill.² Leona McCauley died in 1979.³

Raymond Parks was born at Wedowee, Alabama, on 12 February 1903, the son of David Parks and Geri Culbertson.⁴ He worked as a barber, and the Encyclopedia of Alabama describes him as a barber from Wedowee in Randolph County.^1,4 He was a charter member of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP and helped lead a national pledge drive for the legal defence of the Scottsboro Boys.⁴

The two were introduced in 1931 and married on 18 December 1932 at the house of her mother.^3,4 Rosa was nineteen.^1,2 In the early 1940s she became active in the Montgomery NAACP and served as its secretary.¹ They had no children.³

On 1 December 1955 Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus, and she was later tried and fined ten dollars.¹ Wikipedia records that Raymond lost his job at Maxwell Air Force Base in January 1956, a week after she lost hers.³

In 1957 the Parkses moved to Detroit to be near her brother.¹ Wikipedia dates the move to August 1957.³ The National Women’s History Museum records a first move to Hampton, Virginia, before they settled in Detroit, and Raymond’s biography lists Hampton among the places he worked as a barber.^2,4

In 1965 Rosa Parks joined the staff of Representative John Conyers and ran his Detroit office until she retired in 1988.¹ Raymond Parks died in Detroit on 19 August 1977.⁴ In 1987 she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development with Elaine Eason Steele.³ She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999.³

Rosa Parks died in Detroit on 24 October 2005, aged 92.^1,2 Her coffin lay in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol on 30 and 31 October 2005. She was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit, in a mausoleum with her husband and her mother.³

Her papers are at the Library of Congress, and its catalogue already names relatives in the titles of family photographs, such as her paternal grandfather.⁵ Many of the trees that rank for her name are user-made pages that mix her with other women called Rosa Parks, so a date found there needs a second source before it goes on a chart.

To extend this chart in the editor, add a person beside the right parent and record the source in the person’s notes. Keep the rule for recent lives, so that living relatives appear by name and relation only.