Ward, William Earl Dodge, 1884-1977

Son, grandson, brother, husband, nephew, uncle, and cousin of missionaries, William Earl Dodge Ward was born in Newton Center, Massachusetts in 1884 to Langdon Storer Ward, Treasurer of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and Laura Arixene Bliss Ward, herself a missionary at a young age. Ward, known to family and friends as Earl, spent the first twenty-two years of his life in Massachusetts. His father died in 1895 when Earl was not quite 11 years old, leaving Laura Ward with seven children (an eighth having died earlier) to raise on a small income. Laura Ward had made a commitment to her husband to educate the children - all of them, including the girls - and she followed through on the promise, sending Earl and his brothers to Amherst College (Earl and his twin Mark Hopkins Ward were graduates in the Class of 1906) and daughters Mary, Ruth, and Laura to Mt. Holyoke College. Laura herself moved to Amherst to be near her children.

All but one of the close-knit Ward children became missionaries. When Earl's turn came, he went first to the mission station in Harpoot, Turkey in 1909, serving as treasurer of Euphrates College and the Harpoot mission. As his letters home testify, the position was not a good match, and Earl returned to the U.S. in 1913. In 1915 he married missionary Dora (or Doreen) Judd Mattoon (1883-1979), whom he had met while in Harpoot, where Doreen taught in schools and was a touring missionary (supervising native Bible women) in the area until her marriage in 1915.

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