♀Florentina Degling

Florentina Degling (c. 1778 – 25 March 1820) was a woman of the Kaukehmen and Neukirch parishes in Kreis Niederung, East Prussia, who died at Tilsit at the age of 42. She was the third great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her son Johann Friedrich Rickert (born 1803), and the wife of Carl Rickert. Her life is known from church registers, above all her son’s baptism in 1803 and her own death in 1820.

Marriage and family

On 20 October 1803 she gave birth to a son, Johann Friedrich, who was baptized four days later, on 24 October, in the Evangelical church at Kaukehmen; the entry names his parents as Carl and Florentina. The parish lay in Prussian Lithuania^W, and its register of those years was kept in Lithuanian under German column headings. The index of the register spells the family surname Kiechert, a misreading of the old German script^W: in the entry itself the clerk wrote the father as “Carl Riechert ein Arrendator”, a leaseholder, and the mother as “Florentina geb. Deglingin”, Florentina born Degling. On that page every German-named mother carries the German feminine ending -in (Franckin for Franck, for example), while the Lithuanian mothers carry the Lithuanian -ike, so the ending marks her as a woman rather than making a different name: her family name was Degling. Kaukehmen was renamed Kuckerneese in 1938 and, since 1945, has been Yasnoye in the Kaliningrad region of Russia.

By 1813 the family had moved into the neighboring parish of Neukirch, where the index records the baptism of a son, Wilhelm Gustav, in January of that year; the index entries also record a daughter, Johanne Sophia, baptized at the turn of 1804 or 1805, and a son, Jacob Carl, baptized in October 1810. In 1820 the family was at Tilsit. There the register records the death, on 25 March 1820, of “Florentine”, also written “Degeling”, wife of Carl Richert, aged 42. The stated age places her birth in 1777 or 1778.

Notes

A second Florentina Daegling, baptized at Neukirch on 29 May 1785, the daughter of Michael Daegling and Catharina Barbara Brokopin, was a different woman. She was the wife of Carl Ludwig Wohlgemuth, and the two Florentinas bore children to their respective Carls in the same parish at the same time. Which Florentina married which Carl rests on age alone, and the age at Tilsit, 42, fits 1778 and not 1785.

An online family tree gives her the name Florentine Degling, with a birth in 1788, a death in 1820, a marriage about 1800 at Kaukehmen and three further children born between 1801 and 1813. The death year is genuine, but the birth year is contradicted by the age recorded at her death, and it fails its own arithmetic: a mother born in 1788 would have been about twelve at the marriage. No register confirms the marriage date.

Parentage

The evidence points to her having been the Florentina Doegling baptized at Neukirch on 12 July 1778, the daughter of Andreas Doegling and Anna Maria. The year is the one her age at death gives, Neukirch adjoins Kaukehmen, and it was in Neukirch parish that the family was living in 1813 and that her daughter married in 1830. The identification is probable rather than proven, because no marriage entry naming her father has been found; no entry for the wedding, which would have taken place about 1802, is known in either parish’s register. Her mother was very likely the Maria Ruhin of Jedwilkaiten whom Andreas Degling married at Neukirch in 1765; the register places the entry under 1765, while an index gives 1766, the year of the facing page. The first of the couple’s children was baptized in January 1766, and the index places five children with Andreas and an Anna Maria between 1766 and 1778, Florentina the last of them; another, Erdmuth, was buried in 1776. The identification of the bride with the Anna Maria of the baptisms rests on the same husband and parish. The index also records a David Daegling whose wife was a Ruhin (1787), so more than one Degling married a Ruhin. A Johanna Dorothea Degling, who married at Neukirch in 1800 and named Andreas Degling as her father, may have been her sister.