Charles Howard Laird
Charles Howard Laird was born on 24 August 1921 at Magnolia, a small borough in Camden County, New Jersey. His parents were Charles B. Laird, a New Jersey man, and Veronica L. Coleman, who was born in Pennsylvania and was about seventeen when he was born. A sister, June E. Laird, followed about 1924.
He grew up in the city of Camden, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. In 1930 he was eight, living there with his parents and June. In 1940 the family was in Camden's 14th Ward, in the house they had lived in since at least 1935. Charles was eighteen.
He applied for a Social Security number in February 1937, when he was fifteen, and named his parents as Charles B. Laird and Veronica L. Coleman.
In November 1946 he married Virginia Laura Evans in Philadelphia. She was twenty-one, a Philadelphia girl whose father had died when she was three months old. The marriage record names his parents as Charles Laird and Veronica Coleman, and hers as Thomas Evans and Marion Haas. A family account places the wedding in the Lawndale section of Philadelphia.
By 1950 the couple had settled in Haddon Township, Camden County. On 3 May that year Charles, 28, gave his work as a fireman on the railroad. On a steam locomotive the fireman fed and watched the fire and kept the boiler's water up, and it was the usual road to becoming an engineer. Virginia was 24 and their daughter Sheryl J. was two. They had four children in all: Charles E., Sheryl, Denise and Barbara.
The Lairds stayed in Haddon Township for the rest of their marriage. Virginia died there on 3 July 1988, two days after her sixty-third birthday. Charles was still at Haddon Township in 1995 and 2000. He died on 21 January 2002 at Mount Holly, Burlington County, aged eighty. He was buried beside Virginia in Locustwood Memorial Park at Cherry Hill.
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Cite: Heirology, "Charles Howard Laird (1921-2002)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/charles-howard-laird-1921-2002-3fe860.