The Real Ma and Pa
Laura’s actual parents, on whom she based Ma and Pa, got married on February 1st, 1860. On their wedding day, Laura’s father, Charles Ingalls, was twenty-four and her mother, Caroline Lake Quiner, was twenty-one.
Source: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons
Charles was born in New York but grew up in the state of Illinois, where he learned to be a carpenter, hunter-trapper, and farmer. Caroline, on the other hand, was a schoolteacher. They made a home together in the Big Woods area of Wisconsin, where, in January 1865, Caroline gave birth to their first daughter, Mary Amelia, followed by Laura in 1867. Soon the Ingalls family left Wisconsin.