The Family of Jonathan William & Mariah Shuman Kerns

This photograph, that I saw for the first time yesterday, is a rare moment in time from my family's history. It was taken around 125 years ago in 1900, in the tiny town of Hundred, West Virginia.

It shows my great-great-grandparents, Jonathan William Kerns (March 31, 1849 – October 16, 1916) and Mariah Shuman Kerns (October 18, 1856 – August 4, 1935), surrounded by all nine of their children. At the top right of the photograph stands my great-grandfather, John William Kerns (January 29, 1879 – September 19, 1949), around 21 years old at the time.

A Place Called Hundred

Hundred is a tiny town in Wetzel County, West Virginia, only a handful of miles from the southwest tip of Pennsylvania. It is the only town in the United States with that name, and it owes the distinction to a remarkable couple, Henry “Old Hundred” Church and his wife Hannah Keline. Henry had fought as a British soldier under Lord Cornwallis during the American Revolution, but after being captured by the Marquis de Lafayette and imprisoned in Pennsylvania, he chose to remain in the new country he had once fought against. He married Hannah, a Quaker woman, and the two carved out a life together in the hills of what was then Tyler County, Virginia, but became Wetzel County, West Virginia, when it and forty-nine other counties determined to remain with the Union during the Civil War.

Both of the Church's lived to extraordinary ages—Henry to 109 and Hannah to 106—their longevity becoming local legend. The little settlement that grew around their cabin took on the name “Hundred,” a tribute to the venerable couple whose long lives symbolized endurance and community.

Hundred was never a large place. The 1900 census counted just 261 residents. The twelve members of the Kerns family pictured here made up almost 5% of the entire town’s population. The community grew modestly in the decades that followed, peaking in the 1930s, before declining again. Today, Hundred has a population of about 250 people. about a dozen fewer than when Jonathan and Mariah gathered their children for this photograph.

The Kerns Family

Jonathan William Kerns III was born to Jonathan William Kerns II and Mary Magdolin Grimm in Salt Lick, Pennsylvania, in 1849 and later moved his young family south into West Virginia. His obituary tells us that he farmed a small plot near Littleton for more than twenty years and was well-regarded in the community. When he died in 1916, all ten of his children gathered for the funeral—the surviving members of the family he and Mariah had raised in Hundred.

Mariah Shuman Kerns was born in 1856 in Miracle Run, in Monongalia County West Virginia, a rural farming community just across the county line. She spent her life in the same northern hills and hollows where she was born, raising nine children to adulthood and outliving her husband by nearly two decades. She died in 1935 in Wallace, West Virginia, remembered by neighbors as a strong, steady presence who held her large family together through years of hardship and change.

The names in this photograph represent an entire generation of Kerns children who grew up in the hills of northern West Virginia:

• Cora Alice Kerns (1872–1935)

• Mary Magdalene Kerns (1877–1956)

• John William Kerns (1879–1949) – my great-grandfather

• Albert Wesley Kerns (1883–1959)

• Anna Jane Kerns (1885–1931)

• Leeroy Solomon Henry Kerns (1888–1938)

• George Ray Kerns (1891–1969)

• Clarence Lester Kerns (1893–1925)

• Chloe Lola Kerns (1896–1988)

• Francis Edward Kerns (1898–1984)

Jonathan and Mariah sit at the center of the photograph, framed by their children, embodying the heart of a rural family at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Seeing Their Faces

This photograph came to me only recently, passed along during a trip my parents made to West Virginia. It came from the collection of Nancy Johnson Jones, whose mother, Delvera Kerns, was John William’s daughter—and the sister of my grandfather, William Carl Kerns.

John William Kerns, Ona Moore Kerns, and their son (my grandfather) William Carl Kerns at their Bridgeport, WV home, late 1940s.

Until now, I had only seen photographs of my great-grandfather John as an older man—the head of his own household, surrounded by his children. Here, by contrast, he is just 21 years old, standing at the top right of the photograph with his brothers, sisters, and parents. Seeing him in this way is striking. It bridges the distance between the established patriarch I knew from later portraits and the young man he once was, part of a bustling family. It is the difference between names on a family tree and the vivid reality of faces that carry echoes down through the generations.

Jonathan’s obituary noted that he was the last of his own brothers and sisters, and that he left behind a large family of his own. More than a century later, his descendants are scattered across states and generations, but in this single photograph we can all trace ourselves back to a small farm in Hundred, West Virginia; a place named for long life, and a place where family roots ran deep.