Daniel Edburn 'Dan' Eesley

Daniel Edburn Eesley was born 29 November 1931 in Buffalo, New York, to George Edburn “Bus” Eesley of the Fremont, Ohio Eesleys and Edla “Eddie” Scaife of Cleveland. His father, an Ohio Wesleyan graduate working in the Buffalo-area aviation industry, would die in 1942 when Dan was ten. The family had spent its early years in Buffalo and then in Lakewood, Ohio, the Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie.

Dan was one of three children of George and Edla. His 2018 obituary records that he was preceded in death by both siblings: his sister Jane, who “died tragically in her youth,” and a brother, Richard. Neither has further biography in this archive yet.

He went on to the University of Michigan, graduating in 1954 as a member of Sigma Chi, and entered the U.S. Coast Guard as a Lieutenant Junior Grade. His Coast Guard years left him, in the words of his 2018 obituary, “a deep love of nautical lore, especially lighthouses.” Late in life he would contribute that love practically: he helped restore the Hercules, a 1907 steam tugboat preserved at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.

The Bay Area technology years

In the early 1960s Dan began work in the then-nascent Bay Area technology industry, first as a systems engineer for IBM. The trajectory thereafter ran through the names that defined Silicon Valley’s first generation of mainframe-and-computing companies:

• Amdahl Corporation (the high-performance mainframe rival of IBM, founded 1970 in Sunnyvale by IBM’s Gene Amdahl)
• Memorex (data storage, founded 1961 in Santa Clara, one of the first Silicon Valley spinouts)
• Hewlett-Packard, where he retired in 2000 after the better part of forty years in the Bay Area industry.

He was a continuous resident of San Francisco from 1962 — through the social and political weather of every decade after — while around him the technology industry his career was inside of grew from IBM mainframe systems engineering into the dot-com years and out the far side.

The San Francisco public life

The 2018 obituary records two long civic commitments:

• San Francisco Symphony — season ticket holder and donor for more than thirty years.
• California Academy of Sciences — champion.

The combination is itself a portrait of the kind of Bay Area citizen who paid for and helped institutionally underwrite San Francisco’s cultural and scientific public life across the second half of the 20th century.

Mechanical genius

Dan was a mechanical genius. He took apart a car engine in his teens, and he continued to repair and maintain the family cars for decades. He could fix anything, and was known for his ingenious, simple solutions to everyday problems. A residential landlord in San Francisco for five decades, he did almost all the remodeling and repair on a triplex himself.

The line about the triplex is itself the line about an era of San Francisco. Buying and managing a multi-family building in the city in the 1960s or 1970s, doing your own remodeling, holding it across five decades — the obituary records the man and the city he was inside of at the same time.

Twain Harte Lake

Twain Harte Lake was a favorite summer vacation place for the majority of his adult life. Dan’s long swims from the dock are a treasured family memory.

Twain Harte is in the Sierra Nevada foothills above Sonora, California — the small private lake community where families across multiple Bay Area generations have spent summers. Dan was at the dock for the long swims.

Marriages and family

He married twice. Joan Allnutt was his first wife; together they had two daughters:

• Kate Grey — of Las Vegas, Nevada.
• Beth (Eesley) MacLean — of Alameda, California; married Bruce MacLean; mother of granddaughters Ellie and Grace MacLean.

The third granddaughter, Abby Griswold of San Francisco, is from Kate Grey’s line.

His second marriage was to Susan Thompson Lucas of San Francisco. They were together twenty-seven years. Susan’s daughter from a previous marriage, Sarah Lucas Kass of San Francisco, became Dan’s stepdaughter.

Church and end of life

He was a longtime member of the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco (at 2107 Lyon Street, where his memorial service was held). He had formerly attended the First Congregational Church in Berkeley and St. Luke’s Episcopal in San Francisco.

For his last five years he lived at Coventry Place, a San Francisco senior community. The 2018 obituary names the staff — Myat, Gam, Dora, and Josh — with thanks. He died of Alzheimer’s disease on 7 January 2018, age 86.

The memorial service was held Saturday, 10 February 2018, at 2 p.m. at the Swedenborgian Church, 2107 Lyon Street, San Francisco. The family asked that in lieu of flowers, donations go to the San Francisco Symphony or the California Academy of Sciences — the two institutions of his adult life.

Genealogical position

Dan is Chuck’s second cousin once removed on the paternal side, via the R. Albert Eesley branch:

Albert Robert Eesley Sr. (1837–1902, the Stratford-Toronto emigrant) → R. Albert Eesley Jr. (Chuck’s great-great-uncle) → George E. Eesley (Chuck’s first cousin twice removed) → Dan Eesley (Chuck’s second cousin once removed).

The parallel line on Chuck’s side runs through Albert Robert Sr’s other son Charles Leonard Eesley → Will Eesley → Charles M. Eesley → Chuck.

The 2019 Palo Alto meeting

In 2019, Chuck met Dan’s daughters Beth (Eesley) MacLean and Kate Eesley Grey in Palo Alto, California — the two Albert-Robert-Sr-branch lines, separated by four generations of geography (the Charles Leonard side running Bexley OH → Marietta OH → Palo Alto via Chuck’s Stanford appointment; the R. Albert side running Fremont OH → Buffalo NY → San Francisco via Dan’s 1962 Bay Area move), meeting in person on the Peninsula for the first time anyone in either line had documented. Beth had married into the MacLean family in Alameda; Kate had been living in Las Vegas; both made the trip down to Palo Alto where Chuck had been on the Stanford faculty since 2010. Dan was by then in his final years at Coventry Place in San Francisco; he died eighteen months later.

That two of Albert Robert Sr’s great-great-grandchildren managed to find each other and sit down together in 2019 — 117 years after Albert Robert Sr’s death in Toronto in 1902, on the wrong coast for both of their families’ historical centers — is the kind of connection a genealogical project like this one is built to surface and preserve. The meeting predates the existence of this archive by seven years.

Sources: Daniel Edburn Eesley obituary, 2018; family memory transmitted by Chuck Eesley, 2026.