♀Anna Barbara (surname unknown)

Anna Barbara was one of the Palatine^W emigrants of 1709, who lost her first husband during the emigration and married her second husband, Johann Schultheiss, at West Camp on the Hudson in 1710. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her probable son Johannes Schultz (died before October 1783).

First marriage and emigration

She was most likely the Anna Barbara, born at Gimpern, who married Johannes Rautenbusch at Haßmersheim on 28 October 1705. In 1709 the family joined the thousands of Germans from the Rhine lands who traveled down the river to Holland and on to England, where the London lists record Johan Rautebusch, aged 30, a Lutheran husbandman and vinedresser, with his wife and a daughter of three.

In 1710 the British government shipped nearly 3,000 of the Palatines to New York, where Governor Robert Hunter^W settled them in camps along the Hudson to make tar and other naval stores for the Crown, and fed them in return. By 1 July 1710 Rautenbusch was dead, and from that day Anna Barbara drew rations on Hunter’s subsistence lists in her own name, as Johanna Rautenbuschin, his widow.

Second marriage

On 12 September 1710, at West Camp, Johann Schultheiss married Anna Barbara, the widow of Johann Rautenbusch of Emmerich in the Pfaltz. The marriage was entered in the church book of the Lutheran pastor Joshua Kocherthal^W. Her new husband was a tailor from Gaugrehweiler, near Kreuznach, who had come over alone, and in 1711 he served as a soldier among the Palatine volunteers raised for the attack on Canada^W. About 1716 or 1717 Ulrich Simmendinger’s register of the New York Palatines found Johann, his wife Anna Barbara and two children at the settlement it calls Neu-Heidelberg.

The family later moved west to the Mohawk Valley, where Pastor Sommer of the Schoharie Lutheran church listed Johannes Schultz and his family about 1744. The couple probably had five children: Johann Jacob, Christopher, Anna Maria and Johannes, all named in Johann’s will of 1759, and Maria Elisabetha Barbara, who appears with the family about 1744. Anna Barbara had probably died by 6 April 1759, when Johann made that will at Stone Arabia as a widower.

Notes

How she is known

Her life comes from Henry Z. Jones’s The Palatine Families of New York 1710, in the entry for Johann Rautenbusch’s widow (pp. 750–751) and the entry for Johannes Schultheis (pp. 930–932). Jones abstracts the Mosbach Lutheran church book, the London lists of 1709, Hunter’s subsistence lists, the West Camp Lutheran church book and Simmendinger’s register. The 1759 will, which Jones calls “unrecorded”, comes to him from Sue McCartney Van Wie’s The Shults Family in America; the children, and the link to Johannes Schultz, rest on it and on Pastor Sommer’s list.

The first marriage

The West Camp book calls Rautenbusch a man “of Emmerich in the Pfaltz”, and Jones takes Emmerich to be the family’s last home before 1709. He judges that Rautenbusch came originally from Haßmersheim and Mosbach, where a Johannes, son of Görg Raudenbusch, was baptized on 18 December 1681, and so matches the Anna Barbara of the 1705 Haßmersheim marriage to the widow of 1710. Her maiden name is not known.

Her name on the lists

Jones notes that the Mosbach and West Camp books “firmly call her Anna Barbara Rautenbusch”, while the subsistence lists give Johanna Rautenbuschin on 1 July 1710 and Anna Maria Rautenbuschin on 4 October 1710. The household’s size changes from entry to entry (one person over ten in July, two in August, one over ten and one under ten in October), and the lists do not name the daughter of 1709.