The first female District Attorney of Carbon County says she is a descendant of a family filled with hardworking women.

Jean Engler spoke to a crowd of 28 during the Carbon Chamber and Economic Development’s monthly Women in Business Lunch, hosted at the Third Street office.Engler told the story of her ascension to the elected office, dating all the way back to 1917 when her grandfather was killed in a tragic trolley accident, leaving her grandmother to take care of the couple’s three young daughters.“She raised those three girls on her own. One went to college while the other two went to nursing school, and that was in the 1920s-30s,” said Engler.Engler’s mother kept the tradition going after graduating college and taking a job in New York.She commuted from Jim Thorpe to the Big Apple every weekday during the Great Depression.When World War II broke out, Engler’s father was drafted, leaving her mother to take care of their three children on her own.During the war, her mother studied to take the insurance exam so she could take over the family business while her husband was deployed overseas. Even after his return, Engler’s mother continued to run the business for the next 40 years.“She was truly a pioneer of women in business,” Engler said.In 2014, Engler broke the glass ceiling of the male-dominated law enforcement field when she was sworn in as the new district attorney at the Jim Thorpe courthouse.“We are up against some tough battles. We have to go in and be tough, and we have to be strong,” she told the group.“I’m living proof anything is possible. The bad news is it doesn’t happen overnight.”Engler was born and raised in Jim Thorpe.She departed for Philadelphia to attend Villanova University, where she received a degree in accounting before furthering her studies in law school.“I had to decide where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do,” she said.According to Engler, it was her older sister, Jane, who influenced her to move back to the county.“She was running a private law practice with my father, and they invited me to come work with them. When I came back, I opened my own practice in their office,” she said. “At the time, Judge (John) Lavelle was president judge and gave me all these difficult cases no one else wanted. I really cut my teeth on those.”She worked hard and moved her way up the ladder to assistant district attorney under then District Attorney Richard Webb in 1989. She served the court as a child support prosecutor.“Those cases were 95 percent single mothers,” she said. “For the most part, it was single women who held down two or three jobs without any help from the other parent.”She continued to run her private practice, work as assistant DA and prosecute the family cases through most of her career until reaching her office.“Over the years, I’ve prosecuted thousands of cases, from traffic to murder cases. Carbon has the same crime as everyone else, just in smaller numbers. We have rapes and murders and we have drug possession cases. The drug epidemic affects the whole criminal justice system,” she said.“It has been a real difference from when I started 27 years ago.”Engler was working as the assistant DA when Gary F. Dobias decided to retire after serving as DA for 23 years.“He came to me and said, ‘You want to be DA?’ I said yes.”After only six months, the office was up for election. Engler ran against Carbon County-based attorney Adam Weaver.The district attorney supervises six assistant attorneys, one detective and a four-person staff at the Carbon County Courthouse.Engler also serves as a liaison between police departments and various countywide organizations.“Sometimes there’s just not enough hours in the day,” she said. “The weight of what we do for a living is always on my mind.”She told the women attending the lunch of the low numbers of female-occupied seats in the state Legislature.“It’s only 19 percent,” she said. “There are no women in Congress from Pennsylvania. I’m shocked,” she said.“We are more than 50 percent of the population, so we have some catching up to do.”