Johann Peter Schlicher

For thirty-odd years this archive carried a sentence it could not explain. Robert Earl Wildermuth closed the German travelogue in his 1989 memoir with the research he still meant to finish:

“I hope to return to the home towns of grandma Catherina Boeshar and hopefully that of Johann Peter Schlicher at some later date.”

Nobody knew who Johann Peter Schlicher was. Theobald’s page recorded the problem honestly and left it open — same man, father, or earlier ancestor, no way to tell.

Robert Earl’s own printed ancestor charts make him Theobald’s father, of Adenbach. The answer was sitting in his own papers.

Read that with the caution it deserves. The charts are computer output from whatever database he kept, not a document — and this archive’s rule is that where a chart meets a record, the record wins. On this branch there is no record to test it against: no parish register, no passenger list, no Marietta burial yet found. The charts are also undated beyond “c. early 1990s,” so even the appealing story — that he cracked it after the 1989 memoir and never told anyone — is a guess. He may equally have had it from a correspondent, or from a published descendancy, before he ever wrote that sentence.

What follows is therefore the best current reading of one unverified source, set down so the next person has somewhere to start.

Adenbach

Adenbach is a very small place — an Ortsgemeinde of under two hundred people (191 at the 1994 count) in the Odenbach valley, in the North Palatine Uplands of the Western Palatinate, in what is today the Landkreis Kusel of Rhineland-Palatinate. Its whole municipal area is under three square kilometres.

When Johann Peter was born there in 1797, the left bank of the Rhine was under French occupation — the formal annexation came in 1801. The Congress of Vienna awarded the Palatinate to the Kingdom of Bavaria, and the transfer took effect in 1816 under the Treaty of Munich, when he was nineteen. Adenbach thereafter belonged to the Bavarian Rheinkreis — which is why his descendants in Ohio would describe the family as coming from Bavaria.

That detail matters for reading the American records. The Schlichers were Palatines who were Bavarian subjects, and both words are true.

The two hometowns are in the same district

If the charts are right, here is the part Robert Earl would have enjoyed most, and may never have noticed.

The two German home towns he named in one breath in 1989 — “grandma Catherina Boeshar and … Johann Peter Schlicher” — are in the same district. Catharina Boeshar was born at Breitenbach and her mother Maria Margaretha Jung at Frohnhofen, three and a half kilometres apart. Adenbach lies at the northern end of the same Landkreis Kusel, up in the Odenbach valley.

Two entirely separate immigrant lines, married into each other in Marietta, Ohio — Catharina Boeshar to Johann Michael Wildermuth, and this family’s Flora to their son William Clifford — and both of them came out of the same corner of the Palatinate. Robert Earl’s grandson’s archive can now say that the Kusel district appears twice in his ancestry, from two directions.

(The Wildermuths proper are the exception: they came from Großaspach in Württemberg, some 250 km southeast. It is the Palatine lines — Boeshar, Jung, Schlicher — that converge on Kusel.)

Marietta, and 1861

He married Maria Magdalina Weyrich (b. 27 December 1807) on 28 February 1827, at the place the chart calls “Marth,” in the Rhineland-Pfalz — and their son Theobald “David” Schlicher was born 21 February 1835, in Germany, which fixes the family as still at home that year. By 20 January 1861 Theobald was in Washington County, Ohio, marrying Eva Barbara Schmidt. So the Schlicher emigration falls between 1835 and 1861, in the same mid-century German wave that carried the Boeshars — also Palatines — and the Bavarian Schmidts to the Ohio Valley.

Johann Peter died at Marietta on 11 March 1861 — seven weeks after that wedding, at sixty-three. He had crossed an ocean to die in an Ohio river town, and he lived just long enough to see his son married there.

This page previously said the charts gave no month, so whether he saw the January wedding was unknown. That was a limit of the photograph, not of the chart: read at full resolution the sheet gives 29 November 1797 and 11 March 1861 — and it also gives his wife’s death, 28 November 1879 at Marietta, so Maria Magdalina crossed as well and outlived him there by eighteen years. Whether the two travelled together or he went ahead is still not recorded.

His own parents, per the same chart, were Johann Friedrich Schlicher and Maria Elizabeth Burgarth — recorded by name only, with no dates, and not given pages here until something more than a name turns up.

He is Chuck’s maternal four-times-great-grandfather: Johann Peter → Theobald David Schlicher → Flora Schlicher Wildermuth → Earl Adam Wildermuth → Robert Earl Wildermuth → Terrie → Chuck.

Still open

The charts name the village but prove nothing about it. What would:

• The Adenbach parish registers. Adenbach was overwhelmingly Evangelical (145 of 191 inhabitants as late as 1994), so the Protestant church books for Adenbach or the mother parish at Odenbach are where an 1797 baptism would sit.
• A Bavarian emigration file. Leaving the Rheinkreis required permission, exactly as it did in Württemberg — the same kind of record the Ludwigsburg lead opened on the Wildermuth side. For the Palatinate the equivalent holdings are at the Landesarchiv Speyer.
• A Marietta burial. He died there on 11 March 1861 and his wife on 28 November 1879; a stone, a sexton’s record, or the Washington County probate death register would confirm both — and Oak Grove, where the Wildermuths lie, is the obvious place to look first.
• “Marth.” The chart names it twice — her birthplace and their 1827 marriage place — and now with a region, Rhineland-Pfalz. It resolves to no village this archive can match; a flatbed scan of the sheet, or the Adenbach marriage register for February 1827, would settle what he actually typed.

Sources: the fourteen printed ancestor charts from Robert Earl Wildermuth’s research papers, c. early 1990s — the “Ancestors of Theobald David Schlicher” sheet, which gives Johann Peter’s birth at Adenbach on 29 November 1797, his marriage on 28 February 1827, his death at Marietta on 11 March 1861, his wife (with her own dates), and his parents — the exact dates read from a full-resolution photograph of the sheet in September 2026, the earlier reading having been taken from a small one; Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1989 memoir for the open question this page closes. Adenbach’s location, size, confessional makeup and 1816 transfer to Bavaria from Adenbach, Wikipedia; the Breitenbach–Frohnhofen distance from Frohnhofen, Wikipedia.