Magdalena Ubele

Magdalena Ubele was born 10 August 1711 at Großaspach and married Balthus Wolf there on 27 January 1733, at twenty-one. Robert Earl Wildermuth called her “a home town girl” — she was the Großaspach one of the pair; Balthus came from Reichenberg, the next village over.

She died 13 February 1769, aged fifty-seven, and her husband outlived her by eighteen years.

Correction, August 2026 — three linked errors, now fixed. This page previously said she was born in 1717 and married on 27 July 1733, “seventeen days short of her sixteenth birthday,” and died aged fifty-two.

All three came from one illegible digit and one date convention. The 1988 Ahnentafel gives her birth as * 10.8.171? — the last digit unreadable in the photograph — and her marriage as ∞ 27.1.1733, German day-first. This archive guessed 1717 at the missing digit and read 27.1 as July.

Robert Earl’s “Ancestors of Johann Georg Wolf” chart prints both in full: “b: August 10, 1711” and “m: January 27, 1732/33.” So she was 1711, married in January, aged twenty-one not fifteen, and fifty-seven at death not fifty-two. The picture of a child bride was an artefact of the archive’s own two mistakes compounding, and it is withdrawn.

Her son Johann Georg Wolf was the shoemaker whose trade descended through his daughter’s marriage into the Wildermuth line and eventually across the Atlantic. Her granddaughter was Catharina Dorothea Wolf.

The surname is written Ubele in Robert Earl’s typescript; in German it is Übele, and the umlaut simply did not exist on his typewriter.

Her birth year is not quite settled: the sketch says 1717, and the 1988 Ahnentafel reads as either 1711 or 1717. If 1717 stands, she married at sixteen; if 1711, at twenty-two.

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