♂Fidel Basler

Fidel Basler (1759–1808) was a farmer and citizen of Rheinweiler, a village on the Upper Rhine in Baden. He was the third great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his son Louis Bosler (born about 1786).

Life

He was probably baptized at Bamlach on 20 April 1759, the son of Simon Basler (1711–1778) and Maria Eva Dossenbach (1715–1785). A compiled village family book of Bamlach-Rheinweiler gives his birth at Rheinweiler that year and his death there in 1808, of consumption, and says he was the youngest of ten children of parents who had married in 1734. He is written there as a farmer and citizen of Rheinweiler, and the family name was written Basler from 1786. His brother Simon married Agatha Spony, a half-sister of Jakobea Spony, whose daughter Magdalena married Fidel’s son Louis in 1810.

The couple probably married at Bamlach, in Baden, Germany, on 12 August 1780. In the index of that marriage the groom is written Fidelis Bassler, single and born at Rheinweiler, and the bride Gertrud Sponi, born at Bamlach.

Two FamilySearch indexes record the marriage at Bamlach, on 22 January 1810, of Louis Bosler, aged 23, and Magdalena Zähringer, aged 19, both from the neighboring village of Rheinweiler; the indexes write them as Aloysius Basler and Magdalena Zehringer. One of the two names the groom’s parents as Fidel Basler and Gertrud Spony, and the couple’s place in the family rests on that index alone. The bride and groom are the couple who appear in the Rheinweiler birth registers of the 1820s as Aloys Basler, a farmer, and Magdalena Zähringer, with four children born between 1820 and 1828.

Nothing else is known of him beyond these family entries.

Notes

The marriage was indexed twice by FamilySearch. The groom’s parents are named in one indexing, in the collection Germany, Marriages, 1558–1929, which writes his mother’s name Gertrusd.

Louis Bosler’s name is spelled Bosler, the form his son’s family took up in America; in Baden the name was written Basler.

The baptism entry

A FamilySearch index of the Bamlach Catholic baptisms, from the Freiburg Catholic Church Records collection, gives a baptism on 20 April 1759 for Fidelis Bassler, naming Simon Bassler and Maria Eva Dossenbach as his parents. The entry is known from that index alone. The parents’ names match those the family book gives, and the date falls in the year the family book gives for his birth.

The village family book

Most of the family details in the Life section come from Felix Pöschl and Ingrid Kopf, Ortssippenbuch Bamlach-Rheinweiler 1630–1810 (Basel, 2006), a compiled reconstruction from the parish registers that gives years only, with a few months at most. It is published online at online-ofb.de/bamlach.

The 1780 marriage

The marriage of 12 August 1780 is known from one FamilySearch index, in the collection Germany, Marriages, 1558–1929; the register page itself is not available. The marriage is entered at Bamlach, Müllheim, Baden, Germany. The Freiburg Catholic Church Records index the same marriage again, as Gertrud Spon and Fidelis Bassler. No parents are named for either of them.