Lydia Ann White Eakin
Lydia Ann White was born on March 25, 1825, in Monongalia County, Virginia the only daughter of William White and Mary Darling. She had ten brothers. She married James Eakin on March 26, 1846, in Greene County, PA. James and Lydia built a log home in Wise (now Wana), Virginia* where James was a farmer. A cousin reported that their log home was still being lived in and looked great in 1989. Lydia and James had eleven children. Their first child, Mary, died in infancy in 1848. Their last children, twins, Emmaline and Josephine, were born in 1867. In 1900 Lydia, a widow, age 75, was living with three of her adult children: Harriet, Stephen, Cephas, and her niece, Becky. Becky’s mother, Rebecca, wife of Lydia’s brother Daniel White, died shortly after her birth. Lydia and her daughter Harriet, raised Becky. Lydia and James were members of the Dunkard Valley Baptist Church. Lydia died December 17, 1906, in Wana, West Virginia and was buried with James in the Eakin-Wana Cemetery off the Jollytown Road in Greene County, Pennsylvania.
*In 1904, the Post Office asked that the name of the town Wise, West Virginia, be changed because of confusion with the town of Wise in Virginia. The West Virginia town renamed their town “Wana,” after a popular song of the time.
