John's immediate relatives including parents, siblings, partnerships and children in the Zaffer family tree.

John's Family

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Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during John's lifetime.

In 1896, in the year that John Zaffer was born, on January 4th, Utah became the 45th state in the United States. After the LDS Church banned polygamy in 1890, Utah's application for statehood became acceptable to Congress and the Utah Territory became Utah..

In 1911, by the time he was just 15 years old, British physicist Ernest Rutherford (born in New Zealand), along with German physicist Hans Geiger, discovered the structure of an atom. He found that atoms had nuclei (a nucleus) and were circled by electrons, much as planets orbit the sun.

In 1951, John was 55 years old when on April 5th, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (husband and wife) were sentenced to death for treason. They were executed on June 19th. American citizens, they were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. Their two young sons were adopted by a high school teacher and his wife.

In 1964, at the age of 68 years old, John was alive when in June, three young civil rights workers - Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner from New York City, and James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi - were kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi. Working with "Freedom Summer", they were registering African-Americans to vote in the Southern states. Their bodies were found two months later. Although it was discovered that the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff's Office and the Philadelphia, Mississippi Police Department were involved, only 7 men were convicted and served less than six years.

In 1976, in the year of John Zaffer's passing, on August 4th, a mysterious illness struck an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. Within a week, 25 people had died and 130 people had been hospitalized. It was the first known instance of what came to be called "Legionnaires Disease."