McCabe and Heise from Ireland, Germany and the Mid-West:Information about Wilhiem Henry Drafahl
Wilhiem Henry Drafahl (b. June 12, 1828, d. November 01, 1890)
Notes for Wilhiem Henry Drafahl:
The Drafahl family's place or origin can be traced to the state of Mecklenberg Swerien in the northern region of modern day Germany along the Baltic Sea Coast. At the time of Drafahl family's appearance, before the German Unification , the Principality of Mecklenberg was an independent nation operating within the German Confederation that came into being after the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. When the confederation broke up Mecklenberg became a state within the Prussian Empire.
There are marriage records extant in the archives of the German Lutheran Church indicating that the Drafahl's were busy building families in Mecklenberg as early as the 17th century. Further evidence of the German origin of the family rests in the Drafahl surname itself. "Drafahl" is one of the Americanized variants of the German surname "Drefahl".Drefahl is a contraction of two German words; "drei" meaning "three", and "fuhl" meaning "posts". So it would appear that the first Drefahl's derived their surname from a landmark that consisted of three prominent posts that in all likelihood stood on or near their place of residence.
William Henry Drafahl, also known as Wilheim H. Drefahl before his arrival in America, is the progenitor of the Iowa branch of the Drafahl family. There are three distinct branches of the descendents of the Drafahl family living in the United States, in addition to those of the family that remained in Germany. One branch, that of William and two of his brothers, settled in eastern Iowa in the mid-1800's and expanded westward. A second branch, descendants of a Christopher Drafahl, settled in Wisconsin at around the same time period and for the most part his descendents have remained there. The third branch, descended from Joseph Drafahl, settled in Davison County, South Dakota some twenty years later and seemed to have scattered or been absorbed into other families.
Genealogical researchers tracing the Drafahl family are in general agreement that all three of these families have a common origin and are most surely related. There is some evidence that Joseph had ties to William, perhaps he was a nephew, as he appears to have resided near William's home in Iowa for a short time after his arrival in America. There is also indication that William's and Christopher's families were aware of each other's presence and may have corresponded. However, the identity of the common ancestor of these families has not been identified and may never be, the consequence of the loss of many of the records and archives in Germany from periodic "cultural disturbances", the occasional "large explosions" that destroyed some of the archives, and "modifications" to the political landscape and boundaries of the country.
The first Americans to meet Great-Great-Grandfather William when he arrived in the United States around the year 1851 were the immigration officials. We suspect they had a fairly low opinion of him when they first met him and it's a wonder they even allowed him to enter the country at all considering the circumstances. According to the family legend, William, after crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a cattle boat, managed to make life miserable for the immigration officials by refusing to allow himself to be registered in the port arrival records. It seems the Great-Great-Grandfather was a draft dodger.
Apparently he had bailed out of Prussia, the current owners of the Principality of Mecklenberg, in order to avoid mandatory military service. Because he feared he would be discovered as an escapee from the Prussian army and be shipped back to face punishment, the immigration service found it necessary to go to extraordinary lengths to convince him it was safe before he would consent to give the port authorities the time of day, let alone any details as to who he was and what he was doing in America. Eventually he relented and was permitted to become another member of the "huddled masses yearning to be free". Literally true as the punishment warded out by the Prussian government to draft dodgers was draconian and being sent back would have amounted to a death sentence. Even so, his fear of being deported was so great that it was another eighteen years before he allowed himself to become a naturalized citizen.
While the circumstances of William's arrival are known, having been handed down to his descendants, the port of his arrival has not been identified. Searches of the immigration records in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) archives have not turned up any mention of William and the author is not yet in possession of William's naturalization papers. Since he came over on a cattle boat instead of the normal passenger ship we may eventually find him listed of a crew roster instead of the immigration rolls.
Documentation of William's activities is sparse. He does show up in the occasional census report and tax roll and there is a record of his farm ownership as will as a will but he seems to have succeeded in minimizing any bureaucratic notice of his presence or activities. Not at all surprising when you recall his attitude toward the immigration officials on his arrival in America.
We next encounter William in the river town of Morrison, Illinois. How and why he went there he never bothered to record but we do know that it was there, in the year 1857, that he married Mary Smith. He also managed to acquire an "instant" family in the process as "his"first child, Cristine (Tina) Dorothea Drafahl, has a date of birth of January 17, 1855. And therein lies another family legend.
It seems that Mary Smith, aka Maria Caroline Elizabeth Schmitz (Schmidt) was engaged to be married to a soldier in the Prussian army named Felger (or Felgus). Unfortunately this soldier had the bad luck to be killed before his marriage to Mary could take place and Mary, having already (consummated" the marriage before it actually took place, found herself to be in a "delicate" condition. Social conditions being what they were in the mid-1800's, an unmarried woman with a child was "not a good thing" so Mary decamped for America.
In the company of a sister, she crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a sailing ship. The voyage, taking over nine weeks to make the passage, encountered storm-wracked seas and must have been miserable for the pregnant young woman. Yet somehow she managed to survive it and make her way to Morrison. We are unsure if she met William there, or whether the marriage had been the result of a family arrangement or connection in Germany. Whatever the circumstances, the relationship seemed to take and the newly created family would eventually evolve to include a total of thirteen children.
The story of William's instant family would not have been known had it not been for the fact that Cristine's future husband, John Schlieman, had failed to obtain citizenship before he applied for a marriage license at the Linn County, Iowa, Courthouse in January of 1878. When the application was rejected, and while waiting for John to become an American citizen, Cristine's mother came to her and revealed the story of her parentage. Mary, experiencing an attack of honesty, felt the need to reveal the true circumstances of Cristine's birth to her daughter. Thus it was that in May of 1878 when Cristine and John obtained a marriage license in the town of Vinton, Iowa the name on the license was Cristie Felgus instead of Cristie Drafahl. After the marriage Cristie and John moved to Colton, South Dakota where they raised seven children. Cristie (Felgus) (Drafahl) Schlieman died in 1926 and is buried in the West Nidaros Church Cemetery near Colton, South Dakota. Several of her children have become prominent in Minnehaha County, South Dakota serving as attorneys and businessmen.
Mary's second child, and William's first, was born in Illinois in Morrison on December 3, 1858. They named her Sarah Drafahl and when she grew up she married Charles Carl Rabe (Raabe) in 1876. Sarah died in 1932 and many of her descendants can be found in and around the Linn County, Iowa, area.
The next two children were also born in Illinois, Elizabeth in 1858 or 1859 and John in 1859 or 1860, the dates are uncertain. Elizabeth, sadly, did not survive to reach adulthood and she died in Iowa sometime in 1867 or 1868, probably from cholera during the epidemic that was raging at the time. John's date of death is uncertain but his marriage to Augusta Hiedemann produced several children. John, nicknamed "Jack", operated a farm near Vinton, Iowa, which is in possession of his descendants to this day.
It was at this point, sometime between 1860 and 1862 that William and Mary moved their growing family from Morrison to a community named Glass Mill that had once stood near the town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. One of William's brothers, Johann (John), had settled in the area earlier and we suspect that William, armed with the news and information about the community, believed he could impose on his family's circumstances by moving there.
Just what it is that he was employed at in Glass Mill is undetermined but it must certainly have been better than his prospects in Morrison where he had been working as a cigar maker in a local tobacconist's shop. In the mid-1850's most tobacco shops produced their own cigars, tobacco blends and related products. The owners preferred to hire newly arrived immigrants to make their goods as their labor plentiful. And cheap.
With a growing family William's ability to provide for them as a cigar maker became increasingly problematic. The pay was poor, there were no benefits, the work days long, often from sunrise to sunset and there was no guarantee that you would even "have" a job on the next day if the owner of the shop determined he no longer required your services or didn't like your attitude. William most certainly had all of these things in mind when he made the decision to move west into the "frontiers" of Iowa.
Whatever he was doing at Glass Mill it seems to have paid off. Within two years William takes possession of a farmstead near the town of Palo, Iowa where he worked to improve it and seems to have become a fairly decent farmer. Here he plants and harvests corn, grows animal fodder, raises hogs, chickens and some cattle. He also keeps a couple of horses for use in plowing and for hauling wagons. The farm also included a large vegetable garden and a few fruit trees, probably apples. The "1878 History of Linn County, Iowa", in it's section of Fayette Township (page 763) tells us that William's farm is doing very well having many improvements and making use of many modern (for 1878) farming techniques.
And the family continued to grow, and grow. And grow some more. Children continue to arrive at intervals of one every two or three years. In those days, before the advent of birth control and enlightened family planning, large families, especially farm families were considered an asset. The children represented a labor resource that was absolutely necessary if a farm was to survive and prosper. The boys provided hands for plowing, planting, harvesting and heavy labor while the girls became milkmaids, gardeners, seamstress', cooks and flock tenders. Everyone in the family had to make a contribution if they wanted to eat and William's farm family was no exception.
So the children came, Frederick, the author's great-grandfather, was next in 1863; followed by Henry in 1864 or 1865; William sometime between 1864 and 1867; Mary Elizabeth in 1869; Charles Wesley in 1871; Benjamin in 1873; Augustus Joseph in 1875; and Ricky sometime after 1875.
William seems to have been amazingly lucky with his children. Prior to World War I, when recognizably modern" medical techniques began to appear, it was not uncommon for a family to lose half or more of their children before they reached their majority. If not killed by an epidemic of flu, measles, pox, cholera or some other pandemic the children often died from injuries incurred while working at extremely dangerous tasks in a time when the concept of an ambulance or emergency medical technician did not exist. Nor were these the only killers of children. Such things as congenital heart disease, diabetes, hemophilia and their like could not be dealt with. Thus life for children was often hard, short and unhappy.
Fortunately for William, of his thirteen children, he only lost three, Elizabeth, mentioned earlier, Benjamin who died at age seventeen of as yet undetermined cause, and Ricky who died in infancy. Mary, by the time of her last pregnancy would have been in her mid-40's so Ricky's death is not surprising. Without the services of a modern hospital the death toll among late life children throughout the 1800's was appalling. What is surprising is that Mary survived the birth of her last child at all. As the era of obstetricians, gynecology, neo-natal care, post-natal care, incubators and all the support systems associated with childbirth was still some fifty years into the future. A late life pregnancy in the 1800's usually resulted in the death of both mother and child.
The fact that she did survive brings us to the story of William's last child. If you've been following the development of the family you will recall that William and Mary Drafahl had a family of thirteen children. Of those thirteen children, William fathered twelve and Mary birthed twelve. If you do the math you immediately see that something doesn't quite add up. And that calls for an explanation. And another family legend.
As the years pass and children grow up. This is true today and it was true back then. Young men strike out on their own , begin to build their own lives, start their own families. Young women marry, build their own homes, raise their own children. And parents age. As they grow older they begin to lose their strength and endurance. Farm work becomes harder and takes longer to accomplish. Today we don't give such things much thought and the fact is not an insurmountable problem on a modern farm, no matter its size. Tractors, trailers, harvesters, lifters and other machinery and farming techniques are more than capable of making up for the lost labor that children growing up represent.
In the late 1870's however, these tools were not available to William and Mary Drafahl. But they did have a solution. The farmers of the day, William and Mary among them, would hire on the newly arriving young people emigrating to America to replace the labor lost as their children grew up and left the homestead. Often arranged through family and friends in Europe, this practice served several purposes beyond that of providing farmhands. It gave the new immigrants a job and destination, a necessary requirement to pass through customs and enter the country. It also provided the new arrivals an environment in which to become acclimated to their new adopted county, a place to sleep, and food to eat while they learned to get around in their new world.
It appears that this is what happened on the Drafahl farm. At about the time of Mary Drafahl's last pregnancy a young woman named Anna Pfost came to the Drafahl homestead. Anna was taken in to provide the needed help and assistance that Mary required to run the household. The ensuing events would do justice to the script of a modern television soap opera. Mary apparently has difficulty with her last pregnancy and her last child, Ricky, dies as an infant. William, deprived of conjugal relations with Mary because of a pregnancy and it's aftermath strays into an affair with the young Anna Pfost. The result, predictably, if the arrival of William's thirteenth child. Lena ( also referred to as Charlotte in some references). Relations between Mary and William grow increasingly cool. Anna Pfost leaves the farm while Lena remains behind to be reared as the latest addition to the Drafahl household. The emotional atmosphere of the household must have been "interesting" to say the least.
And poor Lena. She grows up under the disapproving tutelage of a stern Mary Drafahl who is, to say the least, not at all pleased by William's dalliance with Anna Pfost. Protected somewhat by William until she is about twelve or thirteen, after her father's death Lena becomes the focus of Mary's disapproval. By all reports, Lena was so anxious to escape Mary's "care" that as soon as she was of age she leaped at the first opportunity to marry and move out of the house.
William continues to operate the family farm near Palo until his death in 1890. The farm provides a comfortable living although he never manages to go much beyond that. After his death the farm passes to his son Augustus, the older boys having already established themselves elsewhere. Mary resides for a time with her son John before returning to the homestead in Palo. We think she returned because she couldn't get along very well with John's wife, Augusta. She remained there until her death in 1923.
As to William and Mary's children, we know of Cristine, who married John Schlieman and moved to Colton, South Dakota. Sarah married Carl Rabe and they remained in Iowa near the homestead. Elizabeth, of course, died as a young girl.John married Augusta Hiedemann and built his own homestead near Vinton, Iowa. Then there was Frederick,the author's great-grandfather, who moved to Crawford County in western Iowa. He marries Menola Stamper, raises a family then divorces or abandons them, we're not quite sure which, and ends up in the Peace River country of Alberta, Canada where he remains until his death. Henry marries Maude Gulick and settles in Omaha, Nebraska where some of his descendants still reside. William marries Jennie Berger and they remain in Iowa in the Cedar Rapids area. Mary Elizabeth marries John Taswell Mobry and raises a large family of her own in Iowa, the Mobry's becoming prominent community members. Charles also marries and he and his wife, Lois Williams, remain in Iowa.
Of the remaining children there was Benjamin, mentioned earlier, who died at age seventeen; Augustus, who marries Minnie Vogt and inherits the family farm and finally, Ricky and Lena. Ricky was buried in the local cemetery in Palo while Lena, anxious to escape from Mary's wrath seems to have disappeared from the Drafahl family annals.
And thus we chronicle the story of William Henry Drafahl, a Prussian farm boy longing to be free of a regimented life that would probably have killed him at a young age. Escaping to the New World he manages to overcome adversity, build a family, own his own castle, court and bed a maiden, and die peacefully in his old age (actually he was about 58 years old at the time). The good things he did in his life certainly outweighed the occasional bad and the legacy he left his children by his example has most certainly stood them in good stead. All in all, not a bad accomplishment.
Written by Donald Alfred Nelson Jr. (I found this on the internet Sunday July 30, 2000, at [email protected])
More About Wilhiem Henry Drafahl:
Burial: November 1890, Palo Cemetery, Palo, Linn County, Iowa.
Emigration: Abt. 1851, Prussia, Germany.
Immigration: Abt. 1851, Illinois.
Naturalization: Abt. 1869, Iowa.
Occupation: Farmer.
More About Wilhiem Henry Drafahl and Maria Caroline Elizabeth Schmitz:
Marriage: December 1857, Morrison,Illinois.
Children of Wilhiem Henry Drafahl and Maria Caroline Elizabeth Schmitz are:
- +Christina Dorothy Drafahl, b. January 17, 1855, Prussia, d. December 31, 1926, Hartford,Minnehaha County,South Dakota.