Adam Wildermuth

Adam Wildermuth was born 26 October 1768 in Rielingshausen, in the Duchy of Württemberg, the son of Andreas Adam Wildermuth (1745–1771) and Margaretha Lämmle (1746–1778). He was orphaned young — his father died in 1771, when Adam was three, and his mother in 1778, when he was ten.

By the time his own children were born he was living at Großaspach, fifteen kilometres north, and working as a weaver: the Familienregister names him Bürger und Weber zu Großaspach — citizen and weaver — and the 1988 Ahnentafel simply Weber in Großaspach — not a vineyard Gartner like his father. The move down the valley came with a change of trade.

He married Catharina Dorothea Wolf — Robert Earl’s sketch dates the wedding to 25 October 1797 at Großaspach, but the parish chart, the FamilySearch tree and the 1988 Ahnentafel all give 1791, which must be right, since their son Johann Christian was born in 1794. They had a large family — nine children recorded in the tree, among them Johann Christian Wildermuth, Johann Adam, Johannes, Daniel, Johann Georg, Gottlieb, and Friderika Magdalena. Through Johann Christian — who married Maria Margaretha Schmidgall — the Wildermuth and Schmidgall lines joined, carrying the pedigree toward the generation that would emigrate to Ohio in the mid-nineteenth century.

Adam did not live to see them grown. He died 11 February 1800 in Großaspach, the Backnang-district village just east of his home, age 31 — the same early mortality that runs through this whole layer of the eighteenth-century Württemberg line: his father died at 25, his mother at 32.

Sources: The Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage by Robert Earl Wildermuth, 1990; the Großaspach Familienregister extract (his trade and residence); GEDCOM — Dale Eesley / FamilySearch. Robert Earl’s 1989 ancestor chart gives his birth as 28 rather than 26 October 1768 — unresolved.