100th wedding anniversary
For members of the Eckert family
On October 15, 1919 — exactly 100 years ago today — Earl Mahlon Eckert married Emma Lair.
Earl and Emma were Gary’s great-grandparents, his mother’s grandparents.
Earl was born in November of 1898 in a little rural village in Stark County, Ohio. He was the seventh and youngest child of John and Catherine Eckert. He was working as a coal miner by the time he was 19 years old. According to his WWI draft card, he was of average height and build, with blue eyes and red hair.
Emma was born in March of 1895 near Louisville in Stark County, Ohio. Her parents were Joseph Lair and Amanda Vernier; she was the eldest of their five children.
Earl and Emma got married when he was 20 years old and she was 24. The newlyweds lived on Earl’s mother’s farm near Louisville, along with his two older brothers. They eventually had five children together, all sons, and they established their own household in the small town of Harrisburg there in Stark County, Ohio. Earl eventually left the coal mine for a job at a steel mill.
They were kinda the archetypal family of early-20th century Ohio. Many men worked in the mines or had manufacturing jobs. The economy of that area of the country was shifting from small family farms to larger industrial productions. They weren’t particularly wealthy, but neither were any of the other families in their community. And they descended from families who’d been in America for a century or longer.
We don’t know a whole lot about their personalities or the nature of their relationship. We don’t really know whether they were happy or if they struggled or whether they did things their descendants should be proud of or if their actions are best left forgotten. What matters is that we acknowledge their lives and their echoes into history, the effect they had on our own lives today.
Happy 100th, Earl and Emma.