Johann Adam Wildermuth

He was born in 1720 in the Württemberg countryside — most likely in Rielingshausen, the village his family had been in for at least three documented generations by then. He married Rosina Kreher, born the year after him in 1721, and they had at least one son — Andreus, born about 1748, the Gartner (vineyard gardener) who would tend the Neckar-valley vines for the rest of his life.

The 18th-century vineyard generation

Johann Adam’s lifetime (1720–1768) covered most of what historians of Württemberg now call the secure Old Regime century — the long period of relative stability between the wars that had defined the 17th century and the French revolutionary upheaval that would convulse the German states from the 1790s onward. The Duchy of Württemberg under its hereditary dukes was a small Lutheran principality, ruled from Stuttgart, with a settled rural population working land that had been continuously farmed by the same village families for generations. The Wildermuths of Rielingshausen were among those settled families.

The vineyards he and his neighbors worked were the same Neckar-valley slopes the family would still be working a century later when Robert Earl’s research found his great-grandson Andreus recorded as the Gartner of the village. Trollinger and Riesling were the vines; the south-facing slopes of the river valley got the sun the grapes needed; the work was hand-tooled and seasonal. The wine went to the local taverns, the village church, the merchant houses in nearby Marbach. The same trade his father Johannes had presumably done, the same trade Andreus would do, the same trade Adam after Andreus would do — three or four generations of Württemberg Gartner on the same valley slopes.

The double-Adam moment

He died in 1768, age forty-eight.

The year of his death is the year his grandson Adam Wildermuth was born — Andreus’s son, named for the grandfather who had just died. The naming pattern is the standard early-modern Lutheran European convention: a son born in the year of his grandfather’s death carries the grandfather’s name as a continuity, a small piece of the dead man going on. Andreus was twenty when his father died, and he became a father himself the same year. Whether his son’s birth came before or after his father’s death in 1768 is not documented; the two events were close enough that Andreus and Rosina (Johann Adam’s widow) would have lived inside the compressed family moment for the rest of that year.

The two Adams in adjacent generations — Johann Adam dying in 1768, his grandson Adam born in 1768 — are the small surface confusion that Robert Earl’s 1990 research notes worked around without fully surfacing. Both are real. The grandfather and grandson share a name across the seam of a single year.

The reach forward

Johann Adam → Andreus (b. ~1748) → Adam (b. 1768) → generations → Johann Michael the 1847 emigrant → generations → Earl Adam Wildermuth → Robert Earl → Terrie → Chuck.

Worth noting along that chain: the name Adam carries on, ten generations later, in Earl Adam Wildermuth — Robert Earl’s father, Chuck’s great-grandfather, the patriarch of the Marietta Ohio Wildermuths. The Adam line of names that started in 1768 Württemberg was still in use in 20th-century Ohio.

Source: FamilySearch family tree screenshot, transmitted by Chuck Eesley 2026.