Mary Jane Cobb claimed she was Cherokee on her May 27, 1894, marriage record to Christie, but later testified under oath before the Dawes Commission that both of her parents were white.

[7] Aged 17, Thompson married Cleo Owens, a farmer's 23-year-old son from Stone County, Missouri, on February 14, 1921.

[6] The family migrated west with other Owens relatives to Oroville, California, where they worked in the saw mills and on the farms of the Sacramento Valley.

[6] In 1933, Thompson had another child, returned to Oklahoma for a time, and then was joined by her parents as they migrated to Shafter, California, north of Bakersfield.

"[6] On the road, the car's timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-pickers' camp on Nipomo Mesa.

As she waited, photographer Dorothea Lange, working for the Resettlement Administration, drove up and started taking photos of Thompson and her family.

It seems that the published newspaper reports about this camp were later distilled into captions for the series, which explains inaccuracies on the file cards in the Library of Congress.

Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn't have.In many ways, Migrant Mother is not typical of Lange's careful method of interacting with her subject.

The San Francisco News ran the pictures almost immediately and reported that 2,500 to 3,500 migrant workers were starving in Nipomo, California.

The image which later became known as Migrant Mother "achieved near mythical status, symbolizing, if not defining, an entire era in United States history".

Roy Stryker called Migrant Mother the "ultimate" photo of the Depression Era: "[Lange] never surpassed it.

"[6] Having been funded by the Resettlement Administration, the picture was classed as a federal government work and thus public domain, so that Lange was not entitled to royalties.

[19] In the late 1960s, Bill Hendrie found unretouched prints by Lange of Migrant Mother and 31 other images from the same series in a dumpster at the San Jose Chamber of Commerce.

[20][21] After the death of Hendrie and his wife, their daughter, Marian Tankersley, rediscovered the photos while emptying her parents' San Jose home.

[23] In the same month the U.S. stamp was issued, a print of the photograph with Lange's handwritten notes and signature sold in 1998 for $244,500 at Sotheby's New York.

[15] Thompson's children bought her a house in Modesto, California, in the 1970s, but she preferred living in a mobile home and moved back into one.

Thompson died of "stroke, cancer and heart problems" at Scotts Valley, California, on September 16, 1983, at age 80.

[27][28] She was buried in Lakewood Memorial Park, in Hughson, California, and her gravestone reads: "FLORENCE LEONA THOMPSON Migrant Mother – A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood.

"[29] In a 2008 interview with CNN, one of Thompson's daughters, Katherine McIntosh, recalled her mother as a "very strong lady", and "the backbone of our family".