Derek Berger was nervous as the clock struck two. It was his wedding day, a glorious late September afternoon on Martha’s Vineyard.

Last October, Liz Kittleman and Caitlin Jackson stood hand-in-hand atop a hill in Chilmark as a newly married couple. But for years they shook hands after lacrosse matchups as strangers and university rivals.

She grew up in West Tisbury and Chilmark, spent most of high school off-Island, and attended college in New York. He moved to and from the Vineyard with his family, popping in and out of Island schools and landing, eventually, at Boston College.

Vineyard native Chelsea Ives and her sweetheart, Sean Kelley, had been together nearly a decade by the time they tied the knot. So the twenty-nine-year-olds wanted their wedding to reflect their interests as a couple.

Before her August wedding, Krista Cole’s ivory-colored satin and lace bridal dress sat folded up in a box for thirty-one years. It had been her mother’s wedding dress, and her grandmother’s. Krista’s great-grandmother made it in 1954.

When you’ve spent months planning a late August wedding on the beach for three hundred of your closest friends and family, good weather is something you fervently hope for.

Lilly McDowell has been vacationing on the Vineyard since she was eight years old. Charlie Walton was familiar with the territory after lifelong forays from Concord to points south on the Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod.

The Seafood Shanty in Edgartown has been the scene of many romantic beginnings, and it was there that Tyler Alten and Elizabeth Stanton first met, over Fourth of July weekend in 2008.

When Megha Gupta and Jamie Whiteman married, they knew they would have two celebrations: a Hindu ceremony in India, where Megha grew up, and a Christian one on the East Coast, since Jamie is from Virginia.