Eartha Dengler, Founder, Immigrant City Archives, Lawrence, MA

Eartha Dengler is the Founder of the Immigrant City Archives in Lawrence, MA. Mrs. Dengler was born near Hamburg, Germany and lived through World War II in extreme hardship and deprivation. She and her husband left Germany for the United States in 1951 with their four-year old daughter. Mrs. Dengler and her family eventually settled in Lawrence where she started the Immigrant City Archives in 1979 with a limited budget and a few dedicated volunteers.

In an era when immigrant histories were being forgotten and records discarded, Mrs. Dengler sought to collect documents concerning Lawrence's rich immigrant heritage of the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, the archives have grown to more than 750 oral histories, photographs, city records, and documents - from maps, directories and census data to School Committee meeting minutes from the 1850s.