William Henry Caler

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Henry Caler (1805–1883), a 4× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in coastal Maine, parentage, marriage to Lovisa M. Kilton, his daughter Mary L. Caler, and the regional context of Waldoboro and Washington County, Maine in the early-to-mid nineteenth century.

William Henry Caler (1805–1883) was born in 1805 at Waldoboro, in Lincoln County, Maine, a coastal settlement on the Medomak River known in that era for its shipbuilding yards, its lime and lumber trades, and the strong German Protestant character imparted by the Broad Bay colonists who had settled the township in the mid-eighteenth century. He was the son of William Henry "Jost" Caler (1777–1867) and Dorcas Barton (1779–1854), and the Caler surname itself reflects the Anglicization of the older German forms carried into the Waldoboro community by that earlier wave of immigrants.

William Henry came of age during the decades when Maine separated from Massachusetts and entered the Union as its own state in 1820, and when the maritime economy of the midcoast was at its height. In time he married Lovisa M. Kilton, and to that union was born a daughter, Mary L. Caler (1851–1900), who would carry the line forward into the next generation.

The family's later years were spent eastward, in Washington County, on the rugged Down East coast of Maine, where small farming, fishing, and the timber trade sustained the scattered villages along the bays and inlets. It was at Centerville, in the town of Washington County, that William Henry Caler died on the second day of August, 1883, in his seventy-eighth year. He had lived through the administrations of fifteen presidents, the long span from the early Republic through Reconstruction, and outlived both of his parents by several decades.

William Henry Caler stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as a 4× great-grandfather, his daughter Mary forming the link by which his New England lineage descends into the Hyten family record.