Cladina Drake

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63 years ago - Cladina Drake is born.
59 years ago - 4-year-old Cladina's mother dies.
50 years ago - 13-year-old Cladina tells her father, a police officer, that she wants to be a cop too.  He begins teaching her how to follow in his footsteps.
43 years ago - 20-year-old Cladina applies to the police academy, but is rejected.
42 years ago - When her father is killed in the line of duty and no one will help her bring her father's killer to justice, 21-year-old Cladina becomes Black Canary.  She is helped by officer Larry Lance, who becomes her partner.
39 years ago - 24-year-old Cladina marries Larry Lance.
38 years ago - 25-year-old Cladina joins the All-Star Squadron to stop Vandal Savage from taking over all the world's communications.
36 years ago - 27-year-old Cladina takes a leave of absence from the All-Star Squadron and gives birth to Dinah Lance.
​34 years ago - 29-year-old Cladina stops ​28-year-old Rose Canton from killing a member of the 100, but she escapes custody and kills the target.
28 years ago - 35-year-old Cladina is injured while fighting William Asmodeus Zard and Larry Lance is promoted to Lieutenant, so they decide for her to retire and open a flower shop so she can focus on being a mom.  together they start teaching Dinah Lance martial arts.
20 years ago - Larry Lance is killed in the line of duty. 43-year-old Cladina forbids Dinah Lance from taking up the mantle of Black Canary.
17 years ago - 46-year-old Cladina, realizing that Dinah Lance is going to become Black Canary no matter what, gives her daughter her blessing.
7 years ago - 56-year-old Cladina dies of cancer.
Black Canary wasn't originally a heroic legacy passed from a mother to her daughter, but as a result of the various shifts in timelines and alternate worlds that divided the Justice Society and the Justice League, it became necessary to differentiate between the two versions of the character.  As a result, the modern Black Canary became Dinah Lance, the daughter of the classic Black Canary Dinah Drake and her longtime partner Larry Lance.  Obviously, we moved the character from the Golden Age Justice Society in to the All-Star Squadron specifically to allow her to have a daughter that is a modern day hero.

The idea of the relationship between a young hero taking on her mother's secret identity was actually best explored in the pages of the Watchmen by Alan Moore with the Silk Spectre, a character loosly based on Black Canary.  Unlike that relationship, however, we've made young Dinah eager to take on the role and despite her mother's protests after the death of her husband.  It's a disservice to the modern Black Canary to suggest that she was pushed into the role.  Better to say that no one could have stopped her.

One obvious change we made was to change her name from Dinah to Cladina. It's just not common enough in American culture to name a daughter after her mother, and having the two characters share a first name is confusing.  We chose the name Cladina because Dinah can functionally be a nickname derived from it.