♀Anna Barbara (surname unknown)

Anna Barbara (living in 1751) lived among the Palatine^W settlers of the Mohawk Valley in colonial New York and is known for certain from a single church entry at Stone Arabia, where she and her husband, Johann Adolf Walrath, stood godparents in 1751. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her probable son Jacob Walrath (1723–1790).

Marriage and family

Anna Barbara’s surname and origins are not recorded, nor is the date of her marriage to Johann Adolf Walrath. Her husband had come to New York as a boy in the Palatine emigration of 1709 and was usually called Adam there. As Johann Adam and Anna Barbara Walrath, the couple stood godparents at the Stone Arabia Reformed church in 1751 to a child of Hermann Haus, whose wife Maria Margaretha seems to have been their daughter. She may also have been the Anna Barbara Walrath whom Pastor Sommer of the Schoharie Lutheran church noted in the Mohawk Valley on a family list about 1744.

Two of their daughters are named in the Stone Arabia Reformed church book: Anna Barbara married Peter Hillegas there on 18 December 1759, and Maria Catharina married Andreas Forth on 6 September 1761, each as a daughter of “the late Adam Walrad”. Seven more children were probably theirs: Jacob, born in 1723, Amalia, Elisabetha, Maria Margaretha, Magdalena, Anna Margaretha, who married Conrad Pickert in 1751, and Henrich, born in 1737, who named his eldest son Adolf. Her husband had died by December 1759; whether she outlived him is not known.

Notes

How she is known

Henry Z. Jones Jr.’s^W The Palatine Families of New York (1985), volume 2, pages 1056–1057, records that Johann Adam Walrath’s wife “was called Anna Barbara in 1751 at Stone Arabia Ref. Church”, when the couple sponsored a child of Hermann Haus. That entry is the only one certain to name her. Jones suggests that the Anna Barbara Walrath whom Pastor Sommer listed in the Mohawk Valley about 1744 was perhaps the mother of Elisabetha Walrath, one of the probable children. The list of children is Jones’s reconstruction; only Anna Barbara and Maria Catharina are named in the church book as daughters of Adam Walrad, and the family record places all nine with this couple.

Her surname

Jones wondered whether a John Walrave who married Anna Ridder at the Albany Reformed church on 8 November 1721 was her husband. Some family trees take that guess as giving her the surname Ritter. Nothing joins the Anna Ridder of 1721 to the Anna Barbara of 1751, and the family record leaves her surname blank.