Johannes Wildermuth (b. 1682)
also known as Johannes Wildermuth — the second of three Johanneses in the deep Wildermuth line
b. 1682-12-28, Rielingshausen, Marbach, Württemberg, Germany
Johannes Wildermuth was baptized 28 December 1682 in Rielingshausen — son of Johannes Wildermuth Sr. (b. 1650, d. 1694) and Anna Metzger (b. 1650, d. 1728). He married Margaretha Grayers (b. 1685, daughter of Hannß Michael Grayers) in Rielingshausen on 27 September 1708, and the couple raised nine children in the village between 1709 and 1722 — among them Johann Adam Wildermuth (b. 1720), Chuck’s line. That he married and baptized all nine children in Rielingshausen is the documentary proof that he was one of the Wildermuths who stayed in the ancestral village.
He is Chuck’s seven-times-great-grandfather on the maternal Wildermuth line, through the chain that reaches forward across nine generations to Chuck via Andreus, Adam, Johann Michael the 1847 emigrant, Earl Adam, Robert Earl, and Terrie.
He is the second of three Johanneses in the deep Wildermuth line — his father was a Johannes (b. 1650), and the family-naming pattern would carry the name forward and back across several generations of the Württemberg Wildermuths.
The near-miss with the famous Wildermuths
Johannes is the pivot of a tantalizing near-connection. The famous Wildermuths — the writer Ottilie, the psychiatrist Dr. Hermann, and the Federal Republic’s first housing minister Eberhard — descend from Johann Peter Wildermuth, who was also born in Rielingshausen in 1682 but left for Pleidelsheim, dying there of smallpox in 1721 (he was the great-grandfather of Ottilie’s husband). Johannes and Johann Peter cannot be the same man: Johannes was still baptizing children in Rielingshausen in 1720 and 1722, after Johann Peter’s 1721 Pleidelsheim death, and their baptismal call-names differ. But two Wildermuth boys of the same birth year in one small village are near-certainly close kin — plausibly first cousins, conceivably brothers if Johann Peter too was a son of Johannes Sr. (b. 1650). Johann Peter’s parentage is the one undocumented link that would close — or rule out — the connection. The full analysis is in The Wildermuth Clan of Rielingshausen.
Source: FamilySearch family tree (IDs GQWZ-KGK, and GXFG-LN8 for his father Johannes Sr.), transmitted by Chuck Eesley 2026; marriage (27 September 1708, Rielingshausen) and the nine children from the Eesley/Wildermuth GEDCOM.