♂Louis Oliver Bosler

Louis Oliver Bosler (7 April 1825 – 4 August 1909) was a carpenter from Baden^W who married at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1849, and in 1864 moved his family to DeWitt County, Illinois, where he kept a homestead until 1899. He was the great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his daughter Anna Lucy Bosler (1860–1910) and her son Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934).

Early life

He was born on 7 April 1825 in Baden, and his German name was Alois Basler: that is how he signed it at his marriage, and Basler remained the family’s own spelling for decades, while American clerks wrote Basler, Bassler and Bosler. He was in all likelihood the Aloys born and baptized that same day at Rheinweiler, a village on the Upper Rhine in the district of Müllheim, the son of Aloys Basler, a farmer, and Magdalena Zähringer. He was the eighth of their nine known children: four of his six elder sisters had been named Magdalena, like their mother, in four successive years, and at least two of them died as babies. That boy lost his father at six: Aloys Basler, by then the village’s Gemeinschaffner, or municipal treasurer, died at Rheinweiler on 28 June 1831.

Louisville

By the summer of 1849 he was in Louisville, Kentucky, and there, on 7 July 1849, he married Marie Viktor. His bondsman, Henry Bauer, swore that the bride was of full age. The couple stayed in Louisville for fifteen years, and he worked there as a carpenter; by the summer of 1860 they had five children at home, the youngest of them Anna, born that May.

DeWitt County

In 1864 the family moved to DeWitt County, Illinois, near Farmer City. In 1870, when the census called him a cabinet maker, the Walrath family lived fourteen dwellings away in DeWitt Township, and in 1877 his daughter Anna married their son Nicholas. Of the couple’s nine children, seven, born between 1850 and 1868, outlived their father; the two youngest, John A. and Maggie May, died as infants in 1871 and 1872.

By 1880 he was a carpenter again in the Town of DeWitt, with his wife, three sons and a granddaughter, Hattie, aged five. Marie died on 25 November 1888 and was buried in McCord Cemetery under a stone that calls her “wife of Luis Basler”. About a year later he joined the Presbyterian church at Fullerton. He stayed on what his obituary calls the old homestead until 1899. In 1900 the census found him, a widower of 75, in DeWitt Township in the household of Hattie, the granddaughter who had lived with him and his wife as a child of five twenty years before, now married and with a daughter of her own. By 1903 he was living at DeLand, in Piatt County, and that September a newspaper reported that “Lewis Bosler, of DeLand” had been visiting his daughter Mrs. W. M. Haggard.

Death

Louis Bosler died at 7:20 on the evening of Wednesday 4 August 1909, aged 84, at the home of his son George M. Bosler near DeLand. He left seven children, by then scattered from Illinois to Iowa, Missouri and South Dakota, with 27 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. The funeral was held at Fullerton, and his obituary said that interment would be in McCord Cemetery, Farmer City.

Notes

Where he was born

His obituary gives his birth in Baden on 7 April 1825, but the records disagree about where he came from. The 1850 and 1860 censuses give Switzerland, the 1870 census Bohemia, the 1880 census Baden for him and for both his parents, the 1900 census Germany, and his sons’ death certificates Baden. No record of his crossing to America is known.

The Rheinweiler baptism

The entry for Aloys, son of Aloys Basler and Magdalena Zähringer, is in the government copy of the Catholic register of Rheinweiler for 1825, signed by the priest at neighboring Bamlach; FamilySearch’s index files it under Bamlach. Its link to the emigrant rests on the match of the day with his obituary, the name Alois he signed in 1849, and the region; no document yet names both the Rheinweiler child and the man in Louisville. His brother Joseph and sister Gertrud were born in 1820 and 1822, and a last sister, Maria Magdalena, in 1828; his eldest sisters were Katharina (1812) and the four Magdalenas of 1814, 1815, 1816 and 1817; the first and the last of these died within two weeks of birth, and an index records a burial in July 1815 for the second. The 1831 death entry of Aloys Basler, aged 45, names neither his parents nor a wife; it is taken to be the father’s on the name, the village and the age.

Names in the records

The 1850 census entered him by his middle name, as “Oliver Basler”, a carpenter, and gave his age as 35, ten years too many. Later censuses wrote him Louis Bassler (1860), Lewis Bosler (1880) and Louis Bosler (1900). The marriage bond was signed by the groom and by Henry Bauer as bondsman; he was very likely the Henry Bauer listed as a grocer on Jefferson Street in the Louisville directories of 1844–46, and still in the city in 1848–49.

Children and household

His obituary counts eight children, where nine are known; it does not say which of the children who died young it included. The 1850 census lists an infant daughter Mary, a month old, who does not appear in later records under that name; she may be the daughter later known as Lizzie, or another child who died young. A memorial listing places John A. and Maggie May in McCord Cemetery. The obituary also says he left the homestead in 1899 to live with his son George near DeLand, while the 1900 census has him in his granddaughter’s household in DeWitt Township, where the enumerator called him the head’s father-in-law. Hattie appears to have been the daughter of his daughter Caroline.

The date of death

Some indexes give his death as 7 August 1909, which is the date one of the newspapers reporting it was published. The obituaries place the death on Wednesday 4 August, and the age they give, 84 years, 3 months and 27 days, fits a death in the first days of August.