Genna May was born in 1898 on a dairy farm in south central Wisconsin, the eighth of nine children of Norwegian immigrants. She spoke no English when she enrolled at the age of 7 in a one-room schoolhouse built on land donated to the school district by her parents. Although Genna would eventually go on to complete high school by boarding in a town 10 miles from her farm, she started school at a time when Wisconsin required only that young people ages 7 to 15 attend a local grammar school for 12 weeks a year. As a student in “the grades,” as she called them, Genna wrote spelling lessons on slates, erasing them with a wet cloth to go on to arithmetic lessons. She remembered a home with few books and little paper, and she said she would have had no reason to write as a girl except to compose an occasional story assigned by her teacher. After high school graduation in 1917, she enrolled for several months in a private business college in the state capital, just long enough to learn typing and shorthand and win a certificate in penmanship before gaining employment in the office of a company manufacturing disinfectants for dairy barns. In the mid-1990s, Genna was using writing to record recipes, balance her checkbook, and send holiday and birthday greetings to family members.