Agnes Giles
Agnes Dassler was born on 27 November 1820 in Germany, at a place her obituary printed as "Mozenden, near Breman." No village of exactly that spelling has been identified near Bremen, so the name may be a printer's slip for one in the Bremen country.
Her maiden name is uncertain. Two county histories, written in 1899 and 1925 from the side of her younger son Samuel, call her Agnes Geils. Her elder son Henry's obituary in 1941 calls her Agnes Giles. Her own obituary does not give a maiden name, but it says she was the mother of the late Mrs. John Geils. So the name Geils came into the family through a daughter's marriage, and whether it was also Agnes's own name is not settled.
By her obituary she came to the United States in 1845. When she died she had lived in New Rochelle, Westchester County, New York, for forty-nine years, which means from about 1852. Her husband, William Dassler, was a Prussian-born miller who worked in America as a carpenter. In 1900 he told the census taker that he had arrived in 1851 and had been married forty-eight years. Taken together, these dates point to a marriage in America about 1852, the year she settled in New Rochelle. The two county histories tell it differently: they say the couple married in Germany and emigrated together about 1855.
Her sons were born in New Rochelle, Henry W. Dassler on 23 March 1860 and Samuel W. Dassler on 4 August 1862. Both became builders. Henry sat on the city's board of assessors, and Samuel was chief of the fire department and later its commissioner of assessment and taxation. Her daughter married John Geils, a carpenter and builder of the town. She was very probably the Annie C. Geils who advertised as a dressmaker in New Rochelle in 1889 and whose will was proved at White Plains in February 1890, leaving everything to her family.
Agnes belonged to the German Methodist Episcopal Church in New Rochelle from its founding. Her obituary said she was "always taking an active part in its welfare," and her husband was remembered as one of its most active supporters. In 1878 Westchester land assessments were entered in her own name. In June 1900 she was eighty and living in the city's fourth ward with William and their granddaughter Beatrice, a baby of one. William died at the end of that September.
She spent her last months in feeble health at the house of her son Henry, then a city assessor, at 9 Seventh Street. She died there on Monday 7 October 1901, at eighty, of old age. Her funeral was held on the Thursday from the German Methodist church, with its pastor and a former pastor then stationed at Newark officiating. She was buried in the family plot in Beechwood Cemetery, where her husband had been buried a year before. She left two sons and sixteen grandchildren.
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Cite: Heirology, "Agnes Giles (1820-1901)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/agnes-giles-1820-1901-3f01ec.