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Laura Ingalls was born on February 7, 1867, 7 miles (11 km) north of the village of Pepin in the Big Woods region of Wisconsin, to Charles Phillip Ingalls and Caroline Lake (née Quiner) Ingalls. She was the second of five children, following Mary Amelia. Their three younger siblings were Caroline Celestia, Charles Frederick (who died in infancy), and Grace Pearl. Wilder's birth site is commemorated by a replica log cabin, the Little House Wayside.

Life there formed the basis for her first book, Little House in the Big Woods (1932). Wilder was a descendant of the Delano family, the ancestral family of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A progenitor of the Delano family emigrated to the Plymouth Colony in the early 1620s; another family ancestor, Edmund Rice, emigrated in 1638 to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

One paternal ancestor, Edmund Ingalls, was born on June 27, 1586, in Skirbeck, Lincolnshire, England, and emigrated to America, where he died in Lynn, Massachusetts, on September 16, 1648.