Johann Christian Wildermuth

Johann Christian Wildermuth was born 10 October 1794 in Großaspach, in the Backnang district of Württemberg — the village his father Adam Wildermuth had moved to from Rielingshausen and where Adam died in 1800, when Johann Christian was five.

The Familienregister gives him as Bürger und Schuhmacher zu Großaspach — citizen and shoemaker. It is the trade his son Johann Michael would carry across the Atlantic and work in Marietta, Ohio. The same entry gives his father Adam as Bürger und Weber, a weaver: three generations, three trades, as the family moved down the valley from Rielingshausen.

The marriage — 1819, at Rietenau

He married Maria Margaretha Schmidgall of Röhrach on 25 April 1819 at Rietenau, a village a few kilometres from Aspach. She was five years his elder.

This page previously carried the marriage as 25 April 1842 at “Ristenau,” six months before his death — and reasoned from it that Johann Michael, twelve years old in 1842, must be the child of an earlier unrecorded wife. The Familienregister settles it: the year is 1819, the place Rietenau, and the marriage lasted twenty-three years. There was no first wife. The transposed digit had invented one.

Seven children

Born at Großaspach	Name
2 Nov 1819	Catharina Dorothea	died 15 Nov 1819, thirteen days old
22 Oct 1820	Johann Jacob	married Rosina Thaiß at Erbstetten, 1846
18 Aug 1822	Carolina	died 17 Nov 1827, age five
22 Jan 1825	Johann Christian	schoolteacher in Switzerland; married at Kapperswyl, 1856
8 Jun 1828	Anna Maria	nach Amerika
23 Aug 1830	Johann Michael	1847 nach Amerika
11 Jun 1834	Carolina	died 9 Jul 1834, four weeks old

Three of the seven died small, and the name Carolina was used twice — given again in 1834 to a daughter born seven years after the first Carolina was buried, who then lived four weeks. Of the four who reached adulthood, one taught school in Switzerland, one married into a neighbouring village, and two crossed to America.

The orphaning

Maria Margaretha died 30 December 1841. Johann Christian died 7 October 1842, ten months later, at forty-eight.

Johann Michael was twelve. Five years after that he sailed for New York with the Rossars of Baden — and the reason he went at sixteen, with no parent to hold him, is written plainly in these two dates.

Sources: the Großaspach Familienregister extract and the annotated ancestor chart, both from Robert Earl Wildermuth’s research papers; Robert Earl’s “Little Histories”; GEDCOM — Dale Eesley / FamilySearch, sync 1 June 2026.