Charles was born to Wilhelm Kostboth and Maria Sophia Dorothea Muller in Prussia (now Germany).

They moved to South Dakota two years later, claiming a homestead five miles northwest of Canistota, on the west half of section 17.

The couple lived as pioneers on the sparse Dakota prairie where, as Charles' obituary notes, "even claim shanties were few and far between."

A doctor came from Sioux City, Iowa, and successfully performed an appendectomy on Charles who lay on the farm kitchen table.

His cause of death was listed as senility, with secondary contributions from "chronic nephritis and hardening of the arteries", which were complications from an illness contracted around 1914.