Charles Ludwig Kaler

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Charles Ludwig Kaler (1747–1823), a sixth great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Waldoboro, Maine, his German-immigrant parentage, his marriage to Anna Elizabeth Weber, and one recorded son. Notable: he was part of the German Protestant settlement of mid-eighteenth-century Waldoboro on the Maine frontier.

Charles Ludwig Kaler (1747–1823) was born on the second day of November 1747 in Waldoboro, in Lincoln County, on the coast of what was then the District of Maine within the Province of Massachusetts Bay. He was the son of Johann Henry Kaler (1717–1790), part of the German-speaking community whose surnames — Kaler, Weber, and others of the Rhenish Palatinate — populated the early registers of Waldoboro. The settlement itself had been founded in the 1740s and 1750s through the recruitment of German Protestant families to the Medomak River, and the community Charles entered as an infant was very much an immigrant frontier outpost, German in tongue and Lutheran in worship, set among the forests and inlets of the Maine coast.

Charles came of age during the years of the American Revolution, when coastal Maine, exposed to British naval power and to raids upon its shipping, suffered considerably; the inhabitants of Waldoboro, like their neighbors along the Medomak, weathered the conflict and remained upon their lands.

He was united in marriage with Anna Elizabeth Weber, a daughter of the same German-Maine community whose family name appears repeatedly in the early Waldoboro rolls. Of their issue, the family record preserves one son: William Henry Kaler, known by the German familiar form "Jost," born in 1777 and living to the remarkable age of ninety, dying in 1867. Through this son the Kaler line passed forward into the nineteenth century and ultimately into the compiler's own ancestry.

Charles Ludwig Kaler died on the eighteenth day of December 1823, in the very town of his birth, having passed the whole of his seventy-six years within the bounds of Waldoboro. He stood thus among that first generation of Waldoboro-born children of the original German immigrants — a bridge between the founders of the settlement and the broader American century to follow.

Charles was the compiler's sixth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.