Margaretha Lämmle

Margaretha Lämmle was born 7 March 1746 in Rielingshausen, in the Duchy of Württemberg — the ancestral Wildermuth village the family traces through the Rielingshausen parish church. She was a daughter of Johann Michael Lämmle (1718–1787) and Katharina Leibold, one of a large family whose baptisms, marriages, and burials fill the Rielingshausen Lutheran registers across the eighteenth century.

On 19 July 1768 she married Andreus (Andreas Adam) Wildermuth in the same village. Their children carried the line forward — among them Adam Wildermuth and Jacob Friedrich Wildermuth — the generation that stands between the deep Württemberg roots and the family’s later emigration.

Widowed at twenty-five, and a second marriage

Andreas died on 1 June 1771, aged twenty-five, leaving Margaretha the same age with a three-year-old son.

She did not stay a widow long. In 1772 she married Michael Eisenbarth, from Erdmannhausen — the next village over, three or four kilometres across the fields. In a Württemberg village a young widow with a small child and a vineyard household to keep had few other options, and a year was not a short interval by the standards of the time.

Six years later she was dead. She died 8 May 1778 in Rielingshausen, at thirty-two, giving birth to a child.

That is not how the family record had it. The archive carried her death date and nothing else — no second husband, no second village, no cause. The most likely reason is simple: the child whose birth killed her was an Eisenbarth, and the last six years of her life happened under a name the Wildermuths had no reason to keep.

This is known only because Robert Earl Wildermuth posted a form letter and two international reply coupons to the parish office at Rielingshausen, and a pastor went and read the register:

“Margaretha geb. Lämmle hat nach dem Tod ihres Mannes Andreas Wildermuth im Jahr 1772 Michael Eisenbarth aus unserem Nachbarort Erdmannhausen geheiratet. Sie starb 1778 am 8. Mai bei der Geburt eines Kindes.”

The same reply confirmed her birth date, her death date, and her parents’ names against the parish books — independently of the FamilySearch tree the archive had been relying on. Still open: what became of the Eisenbarth child, and whether there were others between 1772 and 1778.

Sources: the Rielingshausen parish correspondence in Robert Earl Wildermuth’s research papers — the pastor’s reply and his annotations on the returned ancestor chart; and the family FamilySearch / GEDCOM tree (Dale Eesley), which supplies her parentage and children.