Looking For Clues

When I was a kid, we used to go tromping through cemeteries.

My dad, as you’ve probably figured out, is Phares O’Daffer, the “stumbleologist” who has spent a lot of his spare time in the last 58 years collecting and sharing information on our ancestors.

On family vacations or trips out east, we’d often take detours through the countryside to find old gravesites.  Particularly in Ohio or Pennsylvania where some of the earliest Odaffers lived.

“Alright, everybody out of the car,” Dad would announce as he pulled our station wagon up to some tombstone grassy knoll. “Start looking for Odaffers.”

My sister Sue and I would pull our heads out of our books, put our shoes on, and gamely start tromping through the cemetery looking at each tombstone for clues to our past. It was a game for Eric, our brother, who was too little to know what we were doing. Mom went along with it because she knew how important it was to Dad.

And, like everything he does, Dad made it fun. “You’ve got 10 minutes,” he said. “Find me someone who was born in 1850. First one who does gets a milkshake.”

Come to think of it, running around a cemetery was a brilliant ploy to break up the monotony of riding in the car on a long trip. Get some exercise and tire us out so we’d stop asking, “Are we there yet?” And no matter who found what, we all got milkshakes.

Also, it was a way for Dad to involve all of us in his research into our family history. I never really appreciated that as a kid. As we grew older, none of us became interested enough in genealogy to carry on where he left off.

But I don’t think Dad ever expected that. He just wanted to pursue his passion and be able to share what he’d learned.  Hence, this website.

Turns out that Dad’s first big discovery about our ancestors didn’t happen in a cemetery, but a library. The Daughters of the American Revolution Genealogy Library in Washington, D.C., to be exact.

Searching for clues in libraries on our family vacations wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun as going to cemeteries.

Johann Wolfgang Odaffer IS a Patriot

After outlining my own interest in family history and in becoming eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution,  I will now relate the often frustrating process of getting Johann Wolfgang Odaffer declared a Patriot.

My Initial Difficulties

In assembling my initial DAR application, I only had partial information and the application was returned with many questions.

The DAR National Society Genealogist concluded:  “It remains to be proven whether John Odoffer of Maryland is the man who performed service in Virginia.  A conclusion cannot be reached based upon the evidence provided.”

Our problem was complicated by the fact that the American Genealogical-Biographical Index (AGBI) references a John Odoffer born in 1740 in Virginia.  The citation for this information is the book Virginians in the Revolution by John Hastings Gwathmey.

However, the Gwathmey book does not in fact contain a birth date or place of birth for John Odoffer.  I have learned it is common practice to assume soldiers were natives of the state in whose army they fought.

The application also was rejected because I had not noted the information Phares O’Daffer had developed concerning Johann Wolfgang’s marriage in Germany and the two children from that marriage.  That should have been included to support his service as a Hessian.

There were numerous other discrepancies cited, generally having to do with the typical inaccuracies which occur when census forms were completed in the earliest days of our country.

One of the most notable difficulties came from the fact that John Odaffer had been given a land grant by the Virginia House of Burgesses, but we had no information about what happened with that grant.  Omitting any mention of a search for land records was not helpful to my cause.

The Impossible Takes a Little Time

At any rate, the first rejection made me more determined than ever.

Phares was most helpful with the additional documentation he had, copies of documents and church records were received from the Clear Spring, Maryland area, and a trip to the Newberry Library in Chicago was most helpful.

I was able to get actual copies of all of the books I needed in which John Odaffer was mentioned and photocopy relevant pages.

I reassembled my material, wrote a rebuttal and sent the package back to Washington, all to no avail.  The genealogist there was still stuck on the fact that my ancestor seemed to be from Virginia, lived in Maryland, and married a woman in Pennsylvania.

What a muddle!  I learned subsequently that differences such as this automatically throw up a red flag when the national genealogists begin to check applications, presumably because people were not as mobile then as now.  They can be explained, but cannot simply be left without further notation.

Nothing Helps Like Good Help

A good friend who was Regent of the Sgt. Caleb Hopkins Chapter, DAR, put me in touch with the Illinois State Membership Chair, who had a great deal of experience resolving “sticky” issues such as mine had become.

She took on the task of filling in the missing information by contacting “volunteer genealogists” which nearly every DAR chapter has.  These kind ladies in Ohio and Maryland searched local land records and concluded the grant must have been sold since there was never property registered in the name of Odaffer.

Having made the search was enough for the national genealogist.  Also, the volunteers pieced together the history of the family’s migration from Maryland to Ohio and made logical conclusions that led to a favorable result.

It Took a Lot of Documentation

Documents used were the Estate Distribution dated March 1816 from Washington County, Maryland, naming the heirs of John (presumably his children).

Also used were the 1810 Census showing John and wife, aged over 45, with eight children, the 1850 Census showing Henry and Elizabeth (ages transposed) with their children in Clear Creek, Fairfield County, Ohio, and the 1860 Census when Henry was living as a member of son David’s household in Pickaway, Pickaway County, Ohio.

All of this is tied back with the 1910 Census in Jacksonville, Morgan County, Illinois, where David lists the birthplace of his parents.

Also used was an excerpt from the “German-American Genealogical Research Monographs #2,” by Smith, published in 1974, p. 43, where Johann Wolfgang is reported as a deserter in Ansbach, Germany who had been conscripted to serve as a mercenary. Also, his family history was verified using a German Parish Register in Ansbach.

Success!

When the application was submitted with all of this information and supporting documentation, Johann Wolfgang Odaffer was declared to be Patriot #206566 in recognition of his support of the War for American Independence.

And I was accepted as a Daughter of the American Revolution! It was all worth it.

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.