Son of Henry William Raver and Margaret Lucinda Raver (Eltzroth)

On October 27, 1897 24-year old William Raver married 19-year old Jessie Gertrude Chappelear at Bunker Hill, Miami County, up near her own hometown of Walton, Cass County Illinois.

The young Raver family, including William's elderly parents Henry Raver and Margaret Lucinda (Eltzroth) Raver then soon left Indiana and headed out west, where they stayed briefly at Carey, Blaine Co., in south central Idaho. It was there in 1899 that they sadly lost their first infant child, William Dale, at only 12 weeks.

By the next year the Raver family moved on further west to settle across the Oregon border near the Snake River at Sumpter in Baker Co., where they had their baby girl, Edith and then Vernon, a couple years later.

Vernon was the third child of eleven born to Jessie. Tragically, Vernon lived only three months, leaving his big sister Edith again as an only child.

Within the following year, Vernon's grandmother Margaret also died at Sumpter, at age 63, and in 1903 she was buried there at Sumpter with Vernon in their shared grave.

A few years later the surviving family moved a few miles southeast to Ontario, Malheur Co., on the Malheur River. While there, they sadly lost their fifth born child, Mildred, aged 1 1/2 years in 1906.

However, at this point, with their two surviving children, Edith and Kenneth, Jessie and William put the repeated early tragedy of infant mortality behind them, and then went on to raise another five healthy infants there in eastern Oregon, all of whom later survived into long adulthood.

A decade later the Raver family moved back to south central Idaho, where they settled Jerome, Jerome County, and there in 1919 they had Wilmer, their eleventh and final child together. The intact family appears together there in the 1920 census.

In the next decade, William left the family and simply disappeared from Jessie's life.

Curiously, in his absence William had begun to raise a brand new family in Arizona, with several children by a much younger woman, Elida Hauskens (whom Jessie outlived).

After a dozen or so years spent in Arizona, the William Raver family moved northwest to Central Oregon in 1946, living not far from Jessie's own children who also returned there.

William died here in Oregon at age 95.