♀Catharina Schultz

Catharina Schultz (died 1749) lived at Rheinweiler, a village on the Upper Rhine in Baden, Germany, where she married Franciscus Jacobus Basler in 1710 and had four sons with him, the youngest two of them twins; she died there a widow the year after him. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her son Simon Basler (1711–1778).

Marriage and family

Franciscus Jacobus Basler and Catharina Schultz married at Rheinweiler in November 1710, when he was thirty. Rheinweiler belonged to the parish of Bamlach, the neighboring village, and its baptisms, marriages and burials were entered in the Bamlach church book. Their first son, Simon, was born the next year and baptized at Bamlach on 27 October 1711. Joannes Melchior followed on 6 January 1717, and the twins Franciscus Jacobus and Benedictus were baptized together on 6 July 1721. Their father died at Rheinweiler in 1748 and Catharina, his widow, in 1749; they were most likely buried at Bamlach on 16 December 1748 and 22 February 1749, a little over two months apart.

Notes

Sources of the dates

The village family book^W is Felix Pöschl and Ingrid Kopf, Ortssippenbuch Bamlach-Rheinweiler 1630–1810 (Basel, 2006), online at online-ofb.de/bamlach, a compiled reconstitution of the two villages’ families from the parish registers. It gives years rather than full dates. It gives her marriage to Franciscus Jacobus Bassler (1680–1748) at Rheinweiler in 1710 and her death at Rheinweiler in 1749, when she is called vidua, a widow, and it lists their four sons. It gives no birth and no parents for her.

The church-book index

FamilySearch’s index of the Bamlach church book, in the Freiburg Catholic Church Records collection, holds the marriage of Jo Jacobus Bassler and Catharina Schultz in November 1710, with no day and no parents; the register page itself is not available. It also holds the baptisms of the couple’s four sons, Simon on 27 October 1711, Joan Melchior on 6 January 1717, and Franciscus Jacobus and Benedictus on 6 July 1721, and no other child of the couple. Simon’s entry names his parents as Franz Jacobus Bassler and Catharina Schultz. Her burial on 22 February 1749 appears twice in the index, one of the two entries on the same page of the register as her husband’s burial of 16 December 1748; neither gives her age or her husband’s name.

Her family

Her parents are not known. A second index of the 1710 marriage, in the collection Germany, Marriages, 1558–1929, gives her birthplace as Rheinweiler; no other record gives her origin. Families named Schultz lived in the parish in her lifetime: a Catharina Schultz, daughter of Jacob Schultz and Catharina Freuler, was baptized at Bamlach on 30 May 1728 and married Meinrad Erny on 4 October 1751, and a Catharina Schulz, daughter of Jacob Schulz and Catharina Wildin, was buried there on 1 July 1740. The first was still living in 1751 and the second was buried nine years before the widow’s death the family book gives, so neither is this Catharina, and no record ties her to either family.