Gloria Gaynor
Gaynor in 2005, photo by Prphotos.com
Birth Name: Gloria Fowles
Place of Birth: Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
Date of Birth: September 7, 1943
Ethnicity: African-American
Gloria Gaynor is an American singer. Among her hits is the song “I Will Survive.” She was a member of the jazz and R&B band The Soul Satisfiers.
She is the daughter of Queenie Mae/May and Daniel Fowles. Proctor is her mother’s first husband’s name. Gloria and her six siblings were raised mostly by their mother and maternal grandmother.
Gloria’s maternal grandfather was named Moore.
Gloria’s maternal grandmother was named Fanny Nobles/Knoble. Fanny was born in Alabama. She later married Frank Smart.
Source: https://njmonthly.com
According to Gloria’s book, her grandmother was Fanny Nobles, born 1899 in Alabama. She had Gloria’s mother, Queenie, in 1914 by a man named Moore. Fanny later married Frank Smart.
I did find Fanny and Frank Smart in the 1930 census, living in Newark. I also found her marriage record to Frank, but her surname is spelled Knoble and not Nobles.
Ancestry.com. New York, New York, U.S., Extracted Marriage Index, 1866-1937 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014.
Queenie’s first husband was James Proctor. She married him in 1933, but she was using the surname Moore — not Knoble/Nobles or Smart.
Ancestry.com. New Jersey, U.S., Marriage Index, 1901-2016 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016.
Then Queenie met Daniel Fowles, who became Gloria’s father.