Familienregister extract — Johann Christian Wildermuth's household, Großaspach

A page copied out of a Württemberg Familienregister — the parish family-book that recorded a household as a unit rather than event by event — in a careful clerical hand, on ruled paper. It came back to Casselberry with the rest of Robert Earl Wildermuth’s German correspondence, and it is the single densest German document in the archive.

It also corrects two things the archive had wrong for years.

The household

Johann Christian Wildermuth * 10.10.1794 Großaspach · Bürger u. Schuhmacher zu Großaspach · † 7.10.1842 Großaspach ∞ 25.4.1819 Rietenau

Maria Margaretha Schmidgall * 25.10.1789 Röhrach · † 30.12.1841 Großaspach

Sohn des Adam Wildermuth, Bgr u. Weber zu Großaspach u. der Catharina Dorothea Wolf von Großaspach. — FR II/262 Tochter des Wilhelm Schmidgall, Bgr zu Röhrach u. der † Anna Catharina Landai von Röhrach.

Two occupations the archive did not have. Johann Christian was Bürger und Schuhmacher — citizen and shoemaker — which confirms the trade his son carried to Marietta. And his father Adam was Bürger und Weber, citizen and weaver, not a vineyard Gartner like Adam’s own father Andreas. The trade changed when the family moved from Rielingshausen to Großaspach.

The seven children

Born	Name	Then
Großaspach 2.11.1819	Catharina Dorothea	† Großaspach 15.11.1819 — thirteen days
Großaspach 22.10.1820	Johann Jacob	∞ 3.5.1846 Erbstetten — Rosina Thaiß of Erbstetten (FR IV/192)
Großaspach 18.8.1822	Carolina	† Großaspach 17.11.1827 — age five
Großaspach 22.1.1825	Johann Christian	Lehrer in der Schweiz — ∞ 27.12.1856 Kapperswyl, Anna Maria Stauffer of Rüthi
Großaspach 8.6.1828	Anna Maria	nach Amerika
Großaspach 23.8.1830	Johann Michael	1847 nach Amerika
Großaspach 11.6.1834	Carolina	† Großaspach 9.7.1834 — four weeks

Seven children in fifteen years. Three died small — thirteen days, five years, four weeks — and the name Carolina was given twice, the second time seven years after the first Carolina was buried. Of the four who lived, one became a schoolteacher in Switzerland, one married locally at Erbstetten, and two went to America.

Correction 1 — the marriage was 1819, not 1842

The archive had Johann Christian marrying Maria Margaretha on 25 April 1842 at “Ristenau,” six months before he died — and built a whole hypothesis on it: that Johann Michael, twelve years old in 1842, must be the son of an earlier unrecorded wife.

The register reads 25.4.1819, at Rietenau — a real village a few kilometres from Aspach. The couple were married twenty-three years, and every one of the seven children above is theirs. There was no first wife. Maria Margaretha Schmidgall is Johann Michael’s mother, as the tree always had it.

A single transposed digit had produced a phantom marriage and a phantom missing woman.

Correction 2 — she died in 1841, not 1849

The register and the annotated ancestor chart both give Maria Margaretha’s death as 30 December 1841. The GEDCOM says 1849, and Robert Earl’s own memoir prints 1947 — plainly a typo for something.

1841 is the reading that makes the family make sense. She died 30 December 1841; Johann Christian died 7 October 1842, ten months later. Their son Johann Michael was twelve, and an orphan — which is exactly how the archive has always described him at his 1847 departure. Under the 1849 date she would still have been alive when he sailed.

Anna Maria, and a standing question

Robert Earl’s 1990 research raised the possibility that Frederika Rossar — wife of the Baden shoemaker William Rossar, in whose Marietta household Johann Michael was living at the 1860 census — was Johann Michael’s sister, making the crossing an extended-family undertaking.

The register does confirm that a sister emigrated: Anna Maria, born 8 June 1828, two years his elder, marked nach Amerika. It does not confirm she is Frederika — the names do not match, and the register gives no date for her going. But there was a Wildermuth sister in America, and that is new.

Still open: whether Anna Maria and Frederika Rossar are the same woman; when Anna Maria sailed; and what became of Johann Jacob’s and Johann Christian junior’s families, both of which the register points to by cross-reference (FR IV/192, and the Swiss marriage at Kapperswyl).

Source: Robert Earl Wildermuth’s genealogical research papers; photographed 2026. Companion: the Rielingshausen parish correspondence.