Johann Henry Kaler

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Johann Henry Kaler (1717–1790), a 7× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his German birth, parentage, transatlantic migration to colonial Maine, settlement at Waldoboro, his son Charles Ludwig Kaler, and historical context. Notable: 18th-century German emigrant to the Broad Bay (Waldoboro) settlement in coastal Maine.

Johann Henry Kaler, born the nineteenth of March, 1717, in the village of Nenderoth in the Lahn-Dill-Kreis of Hessen, Germany, stands among the earliest German-born ancestors documented in the Hyten family register. He was the son of Johann Paulus Kohler (1692–1745), and his life carried the family name across the Atlantic from the wooded uplands of central Hessen to the rocky coast of what would become the state of Maine.

The early eighteenth century in the Hessian lands was an age of economic strain, religious aftermath following the long wars of the previous century, and persistent recruitment by agents promoting settlement in the British North American colonies. Among the destinations advertised to German-speaking families was the Broad Bay settlement on the mid-coast of Maine, established under the patronage of General Samuel Waldo, who actively sought Protestant German emigrants to populate his patent. It was to this settlement — later incorporated as the town of Waldoboro in Lincoln (afterward Knox) County — that Johann Henry Kaler came, and where he passed the remainder of his days.

He lived to the considerable age of seventy-two, dying at Waldoboro on the fourteenth of January, 1790, only a few months after the inauguration of the first President of the new United States. In his lifetime he had thus witnessed the transformation of his adopted shore from a struggling frontier outpost of the British Crown into a community of the young American republic.

The family register records his son Charles Ludwig Kaler (1747–1823), through whom the line continued and through whom the Kaler name was carried forward into the generations that would ultimately join the broader Hyten ancestry. The German spelling "Kohler" of the father gave way, in the New World, to the anglicized "Kaler" borne by the son and his descendants.

Johann Henry was the compiler's 7× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.