Once upon a time, on the South Side of Chicago, there lived a family with seven children.

Things were not always easy for the family — the father, a printer by trade, took a job in a steel mill to make enough money to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads — but the mother and father loved each other and their children.

Those children grew up. Six of them got married, and they all lived happily ever after.

Well, not quite, said Carol Schuberth, the first of the seven children of James and Margaret Doyle to marry. They’ve had ups and downs and hard times and good times, she said. But through it all, they’ve stayed together with well over 300 years of married life between them.

“It’s a story to be told in this day and age,” Carol Schuberth said. “We have a strong faith, all of us. We have the depth of love it takes to have a long marriage.”

Carol and her husband, Hank Schuberth, were married 63 years before Hank died in 2018. Her sister, Lynn, married Hank’s brother, Tom Schuberth, 62 years ago. Both couples met at the young adults’ club at the former Sacred Heart Parish at 70th and May streets.

“Lynn and Tom actually started dating first,” Carol Schuberth said. “Hank and I were still getting to know one another. But we were older.”

Hank, eight years older than Carol, had been in the Columban Fathers seminary for more than five years when he discerned that he was not called to the priesthood. That was before he was drafted and served in the Korean War. He returned to the South Side, and when he first saw Carol on her way in to the 18-and-older club meeting, he said, “Here comes another teen-aged knucklehead.”

But they developed a friendship through group activities and eventually went on a date.

“Everything went wrong,” Carol Schuberth recalled. She was running late, and, since it was Saturday, they stopped at church for confession before heading to a movie. But they missed the one they wanted to see, ended up seeing something else and came out to a driving snowstorm. That was when Hank told Carol she’d have to hold the car window up all the way home.

There was no second date until it was baseball season, and they went on a double date to a White Sox game with Hank’s cousin and his girlfriend, and that was more or less that. They married in 1955 at Sacred Heart, where they had met.

Two years later, Lynn and Tom followed them to the altar. They were followed by their sister Peg and her husband, Jack Donohue; sister Bernadette and her husband, Robert Kenneally; brother Jim Doyle and his wife, Shirley, who marked their 50th anniversary this year at the Golden Wedding Anniversary Mass celebrated by Cardinal Cupich at St. John Brebeuf Parish in Niles; and sister Mary Anne and her husband, David O’Callahgan, who will celebrate their 50th anniversary next year.

David O’Callaghan credits the Doyle family’s remarkable record to the example of their parents.

“They were married forever,” he said.

“Our parents were wonderful examples of the Catholic faith,” Carol Schuberth said.

Bernadette Keneally said the siblings and their spouses also are always present for each other.

“We’re all good friends,” she said. “The guys go away to play golf every year, and the women go away together too.”

The couples all had children, ranging in number from Carola and Hank’s eight to Jim and Shirley’s two, for a total of 26. The nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles are all very close as well, Schuberth said.

Most of the people in the next generation likely won’t have the very long marriages their parents had, Keneally said. Some have been married and divorced, and others are marrying later, as most of their peers do.

“I was just shy of my 21st birthday when we got married,” she said. “But that was what people did. We went to a lot of weddings.”

In some ways, marrying young was a blessing, because no one had time to become set in their ways before joining with a spouse.

“In a lot of ways, we grew up together,” she said.