First-Generation Daflers, Part 3: Melchior Harrison Dafler

This is the third in a series of deep-dive studies into each of the eleven children of John Wolfgang and Catherine Dafler.

Melchior Harrison Dafler was born on January 25th, 1861, and died twenty-five months later on February 25th, 1863. He was likely born in the later Dafler farm near Houcksville, in Carroll County, Maryland, and named after a nearby neighbor.

This is about all I can say with certainty about Melchior. Unlike his siblings, there are no other records that mention him. Maryland did not collect regular birth or death records at this time, and I haven't found church records for him. I haven't found a record of a grave site. The US Census is taken every ten years and he died in the span between the 1860 and 1870 surveys. I haven't found any newspaper mentions - which, for the era and his young age, is not surprising either. The sole mention of his life is in his mother's Bible, which became the source document for the Dafler Book. Without those sparse lines of text he might well be lost to history.

Melchior is a reminder to us about the stark challenges that families had to endure regarding pregnancy, childbirth and infancy in the past two hundred years. In 1860, for every thousand babies born, about 344 would die before reaching age 5; that number is now 7. Common causes of death include scarlet fever, diphtheria, dysentery, cholera, and other gastrointestinal diseases. Antibiotics, better sanitary methods, and community resistance from vaccinations have eliminated all of these once-common illnesses from our common consciousness.

But of course, Melchior wasn't a symbol or a statistic. He was a loved and cherished son and brother. Any parent who withstands the loss of a child, at any age, carries that tragedy in their heart for the rest of their lives. I feel quite certain that those two lines in the Dafler Family Bible were not the only memory that his family kept of his short life. An indication of this enduring love is that his sister Rosanna made sure to mention him in her tribute to the Dafler family in 1925.

October is recognized by the March of Dimes as Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. During this time, we remember the losses of children who were met for too brief a time, and the grief left for their parents to endure. It's a much more widespread issue than many people realize; in fact 25% of pregnancies end before birth (often due to an early miscarriage). Many of us have encountered this form of loss in our families. I am myself the father of children I never got to see, the brother to a sister who died soon after her birth, and a relative to cousins who died much too soon.

Today, I'd like to memorialize some other Daflers who we won't otherwise mention often - the children that died soon after birth and the families that loved them.

• John Henry Harmon ("Henry") Dafler, son of John Earhart Dafler and one of the first Dafler grandchildren to start a family, married Clara Cordelia Anderson in 1889. They lost their fourth child, Corda Belle Dafler, at the age of six months. She was born with spina bifida, a condition where some part of the spinal cord is exposed since the backbone did not form properly around it. (Folate supplements are now common for women who are pregnant or preparing for pregnancy; they reduce the occurrence of spina bifida by 70%. ) She was born on January 19th, 1896, and died on August 1, 1896.

• Tobina Dafler, daughter of David Henry Dafler, experienced the loss for three of her nine children during infancy during her marriage to Harvey Shank. Martha Catherine Shank, her third child, died of cholera just after her first birthday. She was born on March 3, 1899 and passed away on March 17 of the following year. Anna Florence Shank (her fifth child) was born on October 10th, 1902 and died six months later of an unrecorded illness. Their eighth child was born on February 8th, 1910. Stanley Wilbur Shank passed away at the age of five months from gastroenteritis.

• The family of Benjamin Franklin Buehner and Nora Etta Dafler (another daughter of David Henry Dafler) lost three of their eleven children to early deaths. Their first child, Margaret Lovina Buehner, was born Aug. 23, 1909 and died eight days later. Born two months early, she died from complications from her premature birth. Their fourth child, Dorothy Catherine Buehner, was born on April 21, 1914 and died at the age of 5 months. She died from acute ileocolitis. Their ninth child, Paul Woodrow Buehner, was born on Aug. 30, 1921 and lived for fifteen days; he also had become ill with a digestive illness.

• The family of Granville Jackson Dafler (son of David Henry Dafler) and Catherine Shafer experienced the early loss of the second of their five children. Sydney Elmer Dafler was born on the first day of 1903 and died on March 20, 1903.

• Granville's daughter Lona Dafler and her husband Russell Curtin had tremendous struggles with losses of four of their six children, After the birth of their son Ray in 1918, they endured two stillbirths in 1919 (a daughter, born premature) and 1920 (a son). Their next child, Paul Russell Curtin, was born on June 27th, 1921. He had a birth defect which left his chest malformed; he passed away from pneumonia related to that condition on February 10th, 1922, at an age of seven months. Their final child, a son, was born premature on July 9th, 1927; he lived for a matter of hours.

• Lorean Marcella Dafler (a granddaughter of John Wolfgang's son Christian) lost her first two children with Russell Lauderback to complications of premature births. Dale Martin Lauderback was born Dec. 6, 1939 and lived for six days before his lungs collapsed; Barbara Jean Lauderback (born Nov. 22, 1941) was also born premature and succumbed a month later due to infection.

I write this story not to sensationalize the brutal medical conditions our ancestors contended with, or to take any cruel pleasure in unearthing the sufferings of these families. Instead, I write these words with the principle that every mother fears, after the loss of a child, that no one else will remember that son or daughter... that their names will be lost to memory once the few people who their lives touched are no longer able to share those stories. Now, separated by decades and centuries, with their parents and siblings long passed, all I can do when I see these stories of potential and hope lost at such a young age is to memorialize it - to tell what little of the story I can discover, to honor these people who were with us for such a short time.