130th birthday
For members of the Eckert family
Emma Lair was born on March 18, 1895. Today would be her 130th birthday.
Emma is Gary’s great-grandmother, the paternal grandmother of his mother.
Emma was born in the small community of Harrisburg — then known as Barryville — in Nimishillen Township, Stark County, Ohio. Her childhood nickname was Minnie. She was the eldest child of Joseph and Amanda Lair. However, Amanda was Joseph’s second wife; Emma had at least six older half-brothers from her father’s first marriage.
By the time she was 20 years old, Emma’s family had moved to the nearby town of Louisville. That’s where she met a young miner named Earl Mahlon Eckert. The couple were married on October 15, 1919. Their first child, a son named Mahlon, was born in 1920; they would go on to have a total of five sons together.
Emma, with her family, lived in or around Harrisburg and Louisville for the rest of her long life. She was widowed in 1968; Emma herself passed away at the age of 75 on January 15, 1971 in the nearby city of Canton. She was buried next to her husband and eldest son in the Sacred Heart of Mary Cemetery of the Roman Catholic parish of the same name (now Saint Isidore Parish).
Though we have some documented information about her life, Emma was never close with our particular branch of her descendants, so we currently know very little about her personality or the intimate details that make up a life — things like her favorite food, if she enjoyed a particular subject in school, whether she preferred to stay up late or wake up early, or the particular circumstances that led to her choice to disregard some of her grandchildren.
All we can really do now is acknowledge her as an ancestor and make use of what we do know about her to build a bridge even farther back into the past history of our family. Happy 130th, Emma.