My Myth of my Family History

As a kid, I often asked my father and my grandmother about where our family came from. Over the years I took those pieces of stories and mixed them with what little I knew of American history and I came up with a story I told myself about my heritage for many years:

Once upon a time, a man named John sailed from Germany to America. He undertook the perilous journey on his own. He arrived in America, where he promptly established himself in Ohio as a farmer. The biggest difficulty he faced was when an insensitive or negligent immigration clerk cruelly recorded his last name as “Dafler”, an ignominy that John was forced to accept. He married a woman who was similar to him in every way. Their children, and in fact, every Dafler that followed them, became farmers too. No Dafler ever found themselves afoul of the law. They never found themselves associated with unseemly elements. Daflers avoided all association with strong drink or smoking. They did not appear in the “gossip pages” of the newspaper. In fact, nothing of public interest ever happened to a Dafler at all until my grandfather joined his four brothers to defend America in World War 2. And that’s all there was to know about the Dafler family.

I now know each sentence of that story is untrue.

This isn’t to say my father or his parents did a poor job of explaining my family heritage - that picture was more the result of my young mind’s attempts to build a cohesive picture from the scraps I had. Some parts of the story weren’t even clear to my earliest American ancestors. The “Dafler Book”, with narrative written within the lifetime of some of John and Catherine’s children, contains gaps and assumptions. Comparison of that work to other contemporaneous records reveals that the Dafler Book is in some ways an incomplete description of the preceding 90 years of the family.

In this blog, I plan to share some stories that illustrate that the Dafler family has had its share of interesting experiences. You’ll hear new details of the immigration story and the Dafler family’s initial home in Maryland. You’ll hear about farming, but also several other professions that Daflers have committed to. You’ll hear stories of Daflers running afoul of the law. You’ll see reports of tragedy and romance. In short, I believe you’ll discover that the people represented by those long lists of names were three-dimensional people who lived lives worth knowing about.

No doubt you've got your own picture of the Dafler story - with varying levels of accuracy and detail. None of us have the full picture. But if we work together and knit together each of the threads we hold, I think we can get a glimpse of the full tapestry.

There are very few Daflers in America. I estimate at least 80% of them descend from our shared ancestor. I hope these stories will illustrate some of the virtues they found within themselves that will inspire us to be the best we can be, and serve to teach our children where they come from.