Alfred

The eldest son, Alfred, studied mining engineering at Columbia and at the mining academy in Freiberg, Saxony. In Germany, the Saga says, he fought eleven student duels.

In 1879 he married Frances "Fanny" Weber, daughter of the Detroit furniture maker Henry Weber. They went west: Alfred worked the Telegraph mine at West Jordan, Utah — where their son Edgar, the future author of the Saga, was born in 1880 — and then homesteaded in Nebraska near Loop City.

Back in Detroit he rose from teller to treasurer of the Wayne County Savings Bank, then went into paper and timber: the Michigan Sulphite Fibre Company at Port Huron in 1888, the North Shore Timber Company, and Great Lakes steamers. He built a house in Grosse Pointe called "Athelney."

On 30 November 1909 Alfred fell from a Detroit streetcar and died. He was 57.

His sons were Edgar Weber Kiefer, the Port Huron paper executive who wrote the Saga, and Francis Kiefer, a forester and a major in the 20th Engineers in the First World War. Edgar's son Durand was a U.S. Navy officer; Durand's three sons — Edgar Francis "Ned," born in China in 1934, and the twins Christie and Michael, born in 1937 — were, in 1951, the last three to carry the Kiefer name.