Balthus Wolf

Balthus Wolf was born in 1710 at Reichenberg and died at Großaspach seventy-seven years later.

Not a Großaspach man by birth

This archive long recorded him as born at Großaspach. He was not. Robert Earl Wildermuth’s “Ancestors of Johann Georg Wolf” chart gives his birthplace as Reichenberg, Duchy of Württemberg — a separate village, which kept its independence until it was absorbed into Oppenweiler in 1938 and now sits in the Rems-Murr-Kreis. It is close by: Aspach and Oppenweiler are neighbouring municipalities, and Aspach-Rietenau still has a Reichenberger Weg running toward it.

The 1988 Ahnentafel is not contradicted by this. Its entry reads “Balthus Wolf, Großaspach” — but that form records where a man lived, not where he was born, and the trades beside the other names show the same convention (“Weber in Großaspach,” “Bauer in Röhrach”). Großaspach was his home; Reichenberg was his birthplace. Robert Earl Wildermuth counted the generations out on the page rather than trusting the arithmetic:

“Balthus Wolf, our great, great, great, great, great-grandfather (that’s our fifth great-grandfather), was the father of Johann Georg Wolf.”

He married Magdalena Ubele on 27 January 1733 at Großaspach. Robert Earl called her “a home town girl” — and now that Balthus turns out to have come from Reichenberg, the phrase reads differently: she was the local one, and he was the man who married in. She died in 1769, eighteen years before him.

Correction, August 2026. This page previously gave the marriage as 27 July 1733. It was 27 January. The Ahnentafel writes it in the German day-first form — ∞ 27.1.1733 — which this archive read as July. Robert Earl’s chart spells it out in English, “January 27, 1732/33,” and settles it. (The double year is the old-style/new-style convention for a January date, not a second opinion about the year.)

He died 6 December 1787, aged seventy-seven — remarkable longevity for a Württemberg villager born under Queen Anne, and a striking contrast with the generation four steps below him, where Andreas died at twenty-five, Margaretha at thirty-two and Adam at thirty-one.

What sits below him

His son Johann Georg Wolf (b. 1742) was “an early German shoemaker” — and it is through him, not through the Wildermuths, that the shoe trade enters this family. Johann Georg’s daughter Catharina Dorothea Wolf married Adam Wildermuth, a weaver; their son Johann Christian became a shoemaker like his mother’s father; and his son Johann Michael carried the trade to Marietta, Ohio in 1847 and worked at it for fifty years.

Balthus Wolf is the root of that.

One date to settle: the sketch gives the marriage as 27 July 1733, while the 1988 Ahnentafel reads 27.1.1733 — 27 January, in German day-first order. That is exactly the slip a reader unused to the convention would make, so January is the likelier reading.

Sources: the original ‘Little Histories’ pages, Robert Earl Wildermuth, c. 1988–93; the Ahnentafel Wildermuth Großaspach, 2 December 1988.