First-Generation Daflers, Part 8: Charles Dafler

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

Charles Ezra Dafler, the tenth of the eleven Dafler children, was born on May 7, 1866. While we have no direct record of his birth, the 1870 census records state he was born in Maryland, which leads me to believe he was born at his parents' final Carroll County farm near Hempstead. Records also give us varying first names: older records use "Cornelius", while later records call him "Charles". He would not be the first Dafler son to prefer a more common first name, so perhaps he chose re rename himself as he grew older.

We see the first record under the name of Charles Dafler in 1880. As a fourteen year old, he was listed as a farmhand living with his sister Rosanna and her family on a farm near New Hope in Preble County. At this time, his brother-in-law Andrew would have sorely needed the help of an able-bodied teenage boy. His daughters were 9, 7, and 4 at the time of this census - too young to be productive help - and Andrew was also studying medicine. Later census records indicate that while Charles was literate, he ended his formal education at the fifth grade. Farm directories at this time list Charles as a threshing machine operator based out of Johnsville, so I wonder if Charles was helping Andrew over the summer until the threshing season came around.

Examination of the 1880 census records near his father's Johnsville farm is conspicuous for the number of occurrences of the surname Apple. A 6-year-old Ivra Della Apple lived with her grandparents Rudolph and Catherine Bickle in 1880; their farm was less than a mile from the 5-acre John Dafler farm. Her parents farmed a 50-acre plot another mile to the south and examination of the 1875 plat map shows several related Apple families had farms in the area as well. It's clear that the proximity of their family's farms would ensure that Charles and Ivra would cross paths. By 1891, the 25-year-old Charles and the 17-year-old Ivra were married in a civil wedding, officiated by the local squire; Ivra had to have her father sign the marriage license due to her age.

An aside: twelve years later, Harry Webster Dafler - the son of Christian Wolfgang - married Bertha Izor. Bertha was Ivra's cousin. As a result, Charles (Harry's uncle) became Harry's cousin as well. This is an example of pedigree collapse. The assumption that we naturally make when working up a family tree is that each marriage is completely separate from every other marriage - but the math doesn't work out. After a while, the sheer number of ancestors each of us has nearly guarantees that two people added to a family tree by marriage have some level of relationship. The restricted ability of our ancestors to travel increases the odds of this occurrence as well. This ends up being just one of at least three cases of pedigree collapse I'm aware of thus far (see the case of the Johnson brothers from the Christmas Weddings post for another). It doesn't indicate that our family is "inbred" or anything particularly nefarious; it's just an interesting fact of our pedigree.

Both Charles and Ivra are notable for their levels of community involvement, as illustrated by the newspaper articles from various Dayton newspapers shown at left. Both were active in the Montgomery County Farm Bureau (both Charles and Ivra were listed as directors representing Montgomery County at the Ohio State Farm Bureau meetings in 1924). Ivra was the Jackson Twp. chair of the Montgomery Co. Women's Democratic Club in 1920 and was recognized for her work in spreading important home health information to the farm wives of the Johnsville area as part of her Farm Bureau work in 1922. Charles farmed throughout this time - he was listed as a farmer in the 1900, 1910, and 1920 census, all three in Jackson Township.

Charles and Ivra had three industrious sons who found success in different fields of life.

• Clarence was born in 1892 and when the United States was drawn into the Great War, his number was drawn early in the Montgomery County draft. To date, Clarence appears to be the first Dafler military veteran. He served as a stable orderly tending to the horses of the 322nd Field Artillery in France. After his service, Clarence became the operator of Dafler Sand and Gravel in Miamisburg. (It is perhaps no coincidence that Dafler Sand and Gravel was a sponsor of a reenactment of the Battle of the Argonne Forest in 1927.)

  

  

  

• Horace was born in 1893 and undertook many different commercial ventures. Soon after his marriage to Susie Eshbaugh in 1916, he was employed by the Adams Express Company as a billing clerk. (Adams Express was an express shipping and mailing company that is actually still in business as an investment company.) By 1925, he and Susie started the "Complete Auto Service Company" with three other business partners; in three year's time they were selling Pontiac and Oakland automobiles and Philco radios in Miamisburg.

  

• Clyde was born in 1894. He married Zoa Ludy in 1916, and by 1917 Clyde was working as a barber in Dayton. Clyde and Horace, along with their wives, shared a house in Dayton during this time. By 1920, Clyde returned to farming and trucking, and Zoa became the head of the Johnsville school; her school led Montgomery County in 1921 in gathering pledges of corn donations from area farmers for relief efforts.

The newspaper mentions end in the late 1920s due to archive limitations, so I have to rely on census records and other scraps of information to understand what happened to these people next. What I can tell from the differences in the employment in the 1930 census to the 1940 census is that the Great Depression hit each of these four families hard. Clarence returned to farming and married Martha Myers in 1935, when he was 43 and she was 28; they had two children. Clyde took over the gravel pit and his wife continued to teach into the 1940s; by 1950 she was still in the workplace as a bank cashier. Horace had the hardest fall of all; the 1940 census shows him as a traveling salesman lodged in a hotel in Lafayette, Indiana, while his wife lived with her mother. Charles and Ivra moved in with Clarence and Susie in Miamisburg around 1930, and Charles worked for a while as a hoister at the gravel pit before returning to the farm life. Their stories are just one dot in the story of the American Great Depression - a stark example of just how much economic comfort and security we take for granted in our lives can be illusory. But it is also an example of how family ties endure, and help us withstand catastrophes such as the Great Depression.

Census records show that Clarence supported his father in his older years; in fact one census-taker mistakenly listed Clarence as living at his father's farm before deleting the incorrect entry. I take it as a demonstration that as Charles got older, Clarence kept an eye out for him and probably helped out with the heavier farm chores. Ivra passed away in 1949 and Charles died in 1956; they are both buried in Sugar Grove cemetery in Preble County, OH. For the last two years of his life, Charles was the last of John and Catherine's surviving children. Horace died in 1961 and Clyde passed away in 1981; neither had children. Clarence lived to see his 99th birthday, passing away in 1991. His two children (named for his father and his sister-in-law) were the only descendants left to continue the Charles Dafler line.