Darwin Shaeffer Hatch was born on February 19, 1883, in Kentland, Indiana, to Jethro Ayers Hatch and Sarah Melissa Shaeffer. His father was a doctor. He grew up and attended school in Kentland, Indiana, and he graduated from Purdue University with a degree in electrical engineering in 1906. His university yearbook described him as a “slow methodical sort of personage, who merits his professional sobriety partly through inheritance, but chiefly through his knowledge of medical and anatomic love.”
He married Maud V. Pendergrass in Newton County, Indiana, on June 11, 1906, and they had at least three children: Dorothy, born around 1907; Virginia, born around 1911; and Darwin, born around 1914. They lived in Chicago, Illinois, and Shaeffer worked as an editor. He died in Chicago on January 20, 1920.