Margaret Leslie Gray was born in Sedalia, Missouri, February 28, 1887. In 1890, her family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where her mother died in March, 1896. Margaret returned to Missouri to live with her grandmother and Aunt Sallie Gray until her father remarried in 1898 and she returned to Nashville. There on October 18, 1910, she married Smiley Jordan Blanton, a Nashville native who was then an instructor and medical student at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Blanton received his M.D. in 1914 and his later studies and positions made them residents of New York City; Madison, Wisconsin; Baltimore, Maryland; Platteville, New York; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Poughkeepsie, New York; Nashville, Tennessee; and London, England, and Vienna, Austria, where he studied with Sigmund Freud in 1929-1930 and the summers of 1935, 1937, and 1938. For most of the years from 1931 to his death in 1966, Dr. Blanton engaged in private psychiatric practice in New York City. There in 1951, he and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale established the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, a clinic where “psychiatry performs the diagnosis and Christianity supplies the cure.” Blanton published many articles and several books, including the popular volumes Love or Perish, 1956, Now or Never, 1959, and The Healing Power of Poetry, 1960.
Margaret Blanton had far less formal education than her husband but was sufficiently self-educated to teach occasional college summer school courses and to publish. She studied speech and child psychology and with her husband co-authored Speech Training for Children, 1919, Child Guidance, 1927, Emotional Life of Children, 1934, and For Stutterers, 1936. On her own, she published a best-selling biography, Bernadette of Lourdes, 1939; a novel, The White Unicorn, 1961; and several magazine articles.
Her greatest hobby was researching her own and her husband's genealogies and studying the land migration from Virginia to Kentucky, 1776-1800, in which their families were involved. Her research included the following family names: Bate, Blanton, Bocock, Bond, Brown, Caldwell, Chapman, Durrett, Ellis, Embree, Garth, Gerard, Gosney, Gray, Hawkins, Patton, Shackleford, Skinner, Smiley, Sweeney, Thompson, Toomey, Vance, West, Williams, Wilson, and Young.
Margaret Gray Blanton died in Nashville, Tennessee on January 4, 1973.
