In honor of our Wedding Anniversary, I decided to write this blog about “Classmate Couples”, a term I coined to describe ancestors in our family trees who married a classmate. In researching our families, I am curious to know about how people met and eventually married. I love to know the stories or at least the circumstances behind the “what”. Searching out classmates is not too difficult between the years of 1910s to 2000s because there is a growing number of digitized yearbooks held on-line: Classmates.com, FamilySearch.org, or E-yearbook.com and Ancestry.com. Ancestry probably has the most robust collection with over 500,000 yearbooks that have been digitized from 1900-2016 (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1265/) and fully indexed. Using these resources among others, I know of six such couples in our collective tree, although there might be more–I just had a hard time finding the educational records for the couples who married prior to 1870s!
For Jim and my family, in the first 4 generations (through great-grandparents), I found 5 out of 15 couples met either in college or in a k-12 setting. The 6th couple is a great-great-grandparent couple. After a quick Googlesearch of what percentage of college classmates/attendees married their spouse, it appears to be somewhere between 10-15% (of those who go to college) and the percentage of those who met in k-12 much less.
College Couples
At the time Jim and I attended Hope College, the statistic for Hope was about 50% of graduates married another Hope student! So it wasn’t surprising that after Jim and I met the very first 
Jim and Lynn studying in Scotland
weekend of Hope College, we dated all four years, took a couple of classes together, spent our junior year studying abroad in Scotland, and married in the summer after graduation. We are celebrating our 34th Anniversary this week.
My parents also met at college, but since my father is older and went to Henry Ford Junior College for his first two years, their courtship was much shorter. They met at Eastern Michigan University, both were physical education majors, and enjoyed many dancing parties at fraternity houses. They married right after my dad graduated and my mom finished her senior year in married student apartments welcoming my sister right after graduating! They are celebrating their 62nd Anniversary in two weeks.
My great-grandparents Edward Leach and Florence Stoddard also met in college at Olivet College. Unfortunately I don’t have any photos with them together but in an earlier blog I shared a little bit about their courtship and the description from the newspaper about their wedding (The Amazing Power of Newspapers, Part 1). They were married just 14 years when Edward died in 1919.
Jim's parents also “met” in college, but it wasn’t the first time they met!
K-12 Couples
Jim’s parents lived in Three Rivers, Michigan when they were little and attended the same church. I’m not exactly sure if they met before attending school or not, but the earliest evidence that I found that they knew each other was a newspaper photo I unexpectedly came across while looking for photos of my father-in-law in a Hallowe’en costume. The Three Rivers Library has their past issues of the newspaper on microfilm and I paid them to search through several weeks of a particular year. (N.B: Libraries are EXCELLENT sources of local newspapers, because most have not digitized them and
require you to go in person or pay someone to search for you). It turns out that little Billy Breyfogle attended Ruth Bowker’s 6th birthday party and it was memorialized in the hometown newspaper. Ruth’s father was the minister at the church and as a Methodist Minister, he was moved every 5-7 years. The Bowkers didn’t stay in Three Rivers, but it turns out that Bill and Ruth both ended up at Western Michigan University and deepened their friendship during this time but weren’t married for several years after graduating. They celebrated their 64th Anniversary in June.
 |
| S. Erwin is in the back row, 3rd from right Viva Amelia is in the center row first from right |
The 5th couple is actually the couple who made me wonder how many Classmate Couples we had in our trees. Two weeks ago, I came across an incredible photo as part of a collection of Jim’s cousin. It is the Tecumseh High School graduating class of 1890, in which S. Erwin Conklin (#10, son of Myron Conklin) and Viva Amelia Howell (#8, daughter of Dr. George Howell) are featured next to one another. Tecumseh is a small town and it is likely that they knew each other throughout their schooling and not just in high school. Jim’s great-grandparents were married three years later after she earned her teaching certificate from Michigan State Normal School (now Eastern Michigan University). They were married for 40 years before Viva Amelia passed away.
The 6th and farthest back couple I have verified, is Jim’s great-great-grandparents, Dr. George Howell and Ann Amelia Remington. Recently I learned by reading a biography of George Howell a wonderful tribute to his wife and how they met.
 |
| Dr. George Howell & wife Ann Amelia Remington Howell |
“Among Dr. Howell's first schoolmates at the district school, was Ann Amelia Remington, a quiet, modest, bare-foot girl. Her hair was always nicely combed and neatly tied with a ribbon. Her pleasant face was shaded by a calico sunbonnet, and over a neatly fitting dress she wore an apron with sleeves and long, wide apron strings, tied in a double bow knot. She was born February 8, 1844. Her schooling was at a Macon district school, the Adrian High School, and at the State Normal School at Ypsilanti. She was married to Dr. Howell, January 7, 1864.” (p. 238-9, Illustrated History and Biographical Record of Lenawee County, 1903)
They were married for 44 years before Ann Amelia passed away.
It’s fun to learn the stories of how our ancestors met and for me to learn how many met during their schooling was an adventure. Now to figure out how the others met and came to be married!
