My Evolving Interest in Family History (and the DAR)

Greetings!  My name is Jeanne Kay Odaffer Smith and I will be posting about my interest in Odaffer family history and the process I subsequently went through to have one of our ancestors, Johann Wolfgang Odaffer (Odoerffer), declared a Patriot and listed as such by the Daughters of the American Revolution.  But first a bit of background and my reason for putting the effort into this declaration.

My Background and Our Early Odaffer World

I was born in Jacksonville, Morgan County, Illinois in 1945.  My father, Harold Odaffer, has five brothers and sisters and they were the only Odaffers we knew about, except my grandfather Ray Odaffer’s two brothers, neither of whom had children.

My father had been in the Coast Guard during World War II and stationed in New York and Rhode Island.  While there and when we took the Great American Road Trips to see the West in the 1950s, he always searched telephone books for Odaffers but found none.  There was speculation that the family was Pennsylvania Dutch or even possibly Norwegian.

One of my uncles, George Odaffer, married a German woman and brought her home with him.  She knew of people in Germany named something that sounded like Odaffer but wasn’t spelled exactly the same – maybe Oderffer.  That was all we knew.

Our Odaffer World Expands

In about 1975 the “Odaffer” world began to open up for me when our daughter came home from one of the early primary grades with a mathematics textbook written by Phares O’Daffer.  How shocking!  While not spelled correctly (wink, wink), this was my first clue that we were not the only Odaffers on the planet.

Several years later my husband and I attended a performance of the Springfield, Illinois, Symphony which was performed in Bloomington, Illinois.  In the program was noted the financial support of Mr. and Mrs. Phares O’Daffer.  Aha!  He doesn’t live too far away…but I left it at that.

A few years later, possibly sometime in the late 1980s, one of my Odaffer aunts was contacted by Phares and asked for information about our branch of the family.  He told her the family background and left a lengthy document with her.

I must say there was a lot of skepticism.  A Hessian who fought against us in the Revolution?  Come on.

And there was also, strangely, some fear of the unknown.  Some, including my father, now had no interest in learning the history of the family, suggesting that perhaps there were some deep dark secrets that perhaps we didn’t want revealed.

Phares’s documentation was the first we, the Morgan County Odaffers, learned of the O’Daffers living just a bit to the east of us in Piatt County, Illinois.  And (here’s the deep dark secret) my great grandfather was married before and left a woman and several children when he divorced her and moved to Western Illinois.

There he had married my great grandmother and fathered three sons.  I wasn’t even sure “regular” folks got divorces back then but apparently they did!

My Quest to be a Daughter of the American Revolution Begins

I had neither the time nor ability to do any further research but simply accepted Phares’s good work.  However, when I retired and realized a lot of my friends from other organizations in Springfield,  where we were living, were also members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, I became curious about what I would need to do to be able to join.

Would they even accept the descendant of a Hessian Turncoat?

After a brief conversation with the Registrar of the Sgt. Caleb Hopkins Chapter, located in Springfield, I was told that it didn’t matter how my ancestor began the war; it was only important on which side he was at the end.  Well okay then!

I had no trouble with records of births, marriages and deaths occurring in Morgan County.  This took me back through my great grandparents, the aforementioned David and Julia Frazier Odaffer, my great grandparents.

Of course newspaper clippings are often useful as supporting proofs for genealogy, and in the obituary of David Odaffer I discovered a shocking fact – the existence of his first wife and the children by that marriage were mentioned in David’s obituary when he died in 1918.

My grandfather, Ray, was 28 years old in 1918, literate, and certainly knew of the existence of his step- brothers and sisters, but chose never to tell his own children about them.

After all of that discussion about where we came from, he didn’t say a word.  He was a bit hard of hearing but not that deaf!  It must have been something that embarrassed him and he stayed mum, leaving the rest of us to wonder and search.

I’ll blog soon about my quest to have the DAR acknowledge Johann Wolfgang Odaffer as a Patriot – a long and frustrating, although ultimately successful process.