William Henry “Jost” Caler

From the Hyten family archive; subject is William Henry 'Jost' Caler (1777–1867), a fifth great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Waldoboro, Maine, his German-American parentage, his marriage to Dorcas Barton, his son and successor in the line, and the colonial New England-German settler context of coastal Maine.

William Henry Caler, known within the family by the German given name 'Jost,' was born on the second day of March 1777 in Waldoboro, Lincoln County, Maine, and departed this life on the ninth of December 1867 in Centerville, Washington County, Maine, having attained the venerable age of ninety years. His long life thus spanned the period from the closing years of the American Revolution through the conclusion of the Civil War, an extraordinary breadth of the young nation's formative history.

He was the son of Charles Ludwig Kaler (1747–1823) and Anna Elizabeth Weber (1751–1847), both bearers of the surname tradition that places the family squarely among the German-speaking settlers of the Waldoboro region. Waldoboro in the latter half of the eighteenth century was distinguished as one of the principal German colonial settlements in New England, having been peopled in earlier decades by Palatine and other German emigrants drawn to the Maine coast under the patronage of General Samuel Waldo. The Kaler family, with its retained German forms of name — the surname itself an Anglicization, and 'Jost' a familiar diminutive of Germanic origin — exemplifies that heritage. William Henry's parents lived to advanced years, his mother surviving until 1847, a testament to the resilience of that immigrant generation.

William Henry was united in marriage to Dorcas Barton. Of their union the family record preserves a son, William Henry Caler (1805–1883), who bore his father's name and carried the line forward. The younger William Henry stands as the next link in the compiler's paternal-grandmother descent.

In his later years, William Henry removed eastward along the Maine coast to Centerville in Washington County, where he closed his days in 1867. He represents the bridge in this branch between the colonial German settlement of mid-coast Maine and the nineteenth-century Down East communities of the family. William Henry was the compiler's fifth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.