Emma Mae Stiles was born 11 May 1854 in Braintree, Orange County, Vermont, the daughter of Wilbur F. Stiles and Mary Jane Wakefield.¹ By 1858 the family had moved to Michigan, where her brother Ervin was born in Davison, Genesee County.² Within a few years they were settled in Saginaw County, the place that would remain associated with Emma for the rest of her life.

On 22 January 1866 Emma appeared before the Saginaw County Board of Supervisors and was paid $1.70 in witness fees, along with her father, Wilbur F. Stiles, and her brother Eugene.³ She was about eleven years old. This entry places her in Saginaw County at that date and shows her participating in a county court proceeding with other members of her family.

Emma married George Washington Lawhead on 31 January 1869 in Albee Township, Saginaw County.⁴

The following year brought a major change. Her father, Wilbur F. Stiles, died in May 1870 in Grant Township, Iosco County. The 1870 mortality schedule records his occupation as carpenter, his birthplace as New York, and the cause of death as suicide by poison.⁵ In the same year Emma and her husband were enumerated in Grant Township, where members of the Stiles family had gone as part of the movement into Michigan’s lumbering region.⁶

Emma became the mother of three children. Her daughter Margaret Jane Lawhead was born 2 July 1872.⁷ A son, Renaldo, was born 16 August 1877 in Albee Township and died there on 14 October 1877.⁸ Her youngest child, Effie M. Lawhead, was born 26 July 1879 in Albee Township.⁹

In 1880 Emma was living in Albee Township with her husband and daughters Margaret and Effie.¹⁰

Emma Mae (Stiles) Lawhead died 6 April 1886 in Saginaw County at the age of thirty-one.¹¹ No burial place has been identified.

Her life spans the migration of her family from Vermont to mid-nineteenth-century Michigan, her childhood in Saginaw County, the move north to Iosco County at the time of her father’s death, and her return to Albee Township, where she spent her married years and where her children were born.

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Sources

1. Birth date and place from Michigan death record of Emma Mae Lawhead, 1886.
2. Birth of Ervin Stiles, 19 May 1858, Davison, Genesee County, Michigan.
3. Saginaw Courier, proceedings of the Saginaw County Board of Supervisors, 22 January 1866; witness fees for W. F. Stiles, Emma Stiles, and Eugene Stiles.
4. Saginaw County, Michigan, marriage record, George W. Lawhead and Emma M. Stiles, 31 January 1869.
5. 1870 U.S. mortality schedule, Grant Township, Iosco County, Michigan, Wilbur Stiles; cause of death “suicide by poison.”
6. 1870 U.S. census, Grant Township, Iosco County, Michigan, George W. Lawhead household.
7. Birth of Margaret Jane Lawhead, 2 July 1872, Michigan.
8. Birth and death of Renaldo Lawhead, Albee Township, Saginaw County, Michigan, 1877.
9. Birth of Effie M. Lawhead, 26 July 1879, Albee Township, Saginaw County, Michigan.
10. 1880 U.S. census, Albee Township, Saginaw County, Michigan, George W. Lawhead household.
11. Michigan death record, Emma Mae Lawhead, 6 April 1886.