Maria Margaretha Schmidgall

Maria Margaretha Schmidgall was born 25 October 1789 in Röhrach (the small Württemberg village near Aspach, in what is today the Rems-Murr-Kreis of Baden-Württemberg). Her father Georg Wilhelm Schmidgall was a Röhrach farmer; her mother Anna Catherina Landai of the same village.

She married Johann Christian Wildermuth of Großaspach on 25 April 1819 at Rietenau, a village a few kilometres away. She was twenty-nine, five years his elder. Over the next fifteen years she bore seven children — and buried three of them, at thirteen days, five years, and four weeks. The Familienregister sets the household out in full.

She died at Großaspach on 30 December 1841, age fifty-two. Johann Christian died ten months later, on 7 October 1842, and their twelve-year-old son Johann Michael was left an orphan; at sixteen he sailed for New York.

Two corrections sit behind that paragraph. This page previously gave the marriage as 25 April 1842 in “Ristenau” and read it as a late-life match six months before her husband’s death — a transposed digit, which also spawned a phantom first wife on his page. And it gave her death as 1849, following the GEDCOM; the Familienregister, the pastor’s annotated chart and the 1988 German Ahnentafel — the last of them drawn straight from the Großaspach parish register — all read 1841, which is also the only version under which her son is the orphan every other record describes. Robert Earl’s memoir prints 1947, a typo for one or the other.

The “Little Histories” sketch is short and bare-fact — Robert Earl’s typical entry for ancestors three or four generations behind the emigrant. The Röhrach farming-village origin is the deepest Württemberg place-name in the maternal-Wildermuth half of the line that does not retrace to Rielingshausen or Großaspach themselves.

Sources: Robert Earl Wildermuth’s “Little Histories” — Johann Christian Wildermuth section; GEDCOM — Dale Eesley / FamilySearch, sync 1 June 2026.