♂Johann Adolf Walrath

Johann Adolf Walrath (15 March 1700 – before 18 December 1759) was a Palatine^W German who came to New York as a boy in the great emigration of 1709 and spent his life on the colony’s frontier, at Schoharie and then in the Mohawk Valley, at Stone Arabia and German Flatts. In New York he was usually called Adam. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his probable son Jacob Walrath (1723–1790).

Early life

He was almost certainly the Johann Adolf Walrath born on 15 March 1700 at Ennerich, a village in the parish of Runkel in what is now Hesse, Germany, the son of Gerhardt Walrath and his second wife, Maria Reffi. He took his name from his first godfather, Johann Adolf Reffi of Niederhausen, a kinsman of his mother’s to judge by the surname. None of the three children born to his parents before him seems to have lived past the age of four.

The family joined the Palatines who left for England in 1709, and from July 1710 Gerhardt Walrath drew rations for his household in New York on Governor Robert Hunter’s^W subsistence lists. By 1717 Adolf, at seventeen, was at Schoharie, where he stood godfather to a child of Johann Leer.

His father is said to have been one of three deputies the Palatines sent to London in 1718, with Johann Conrad Weiser^W and William Scheff, to seek justice over their lands at Schoharie; robbed by pirates on the way and jailed for debt in London, he died on the voyage back to New York. Adolf was eighteen when his father sailed.

In the Mohawk Valley

He married a woman named Anna Barbara, whose surname and origins are not recorded, on a date that is not known. The Palatine settlers used Adam and Adolf as forms of the same name, and in the Mohawk Valley he appears as Adam. 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. Two years later Adam Walrath signed a subscription list for building a Reformed church at German Flatts, his name next to that of Johannes Wallrath, most likely his younger brother.

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. Adam had died by the time of his daughter Anna Barbara’s wedding in December 1759.

Notes

How he is known

Everything here comes from Henry Z. Jones Jr.’s^W The Palatine Families of New York (1985), volume 2, pages 1055–1057, which abstracts the Runkel church book in Germany, the subsistence lists of 1710–1712, and the church books of West Camp, Stone Arabia and German Flatts in New York. Jones and Rohrbach’s Even More Palatine Families (2002) gives the two daughters’ marriages again, each as a daughter of “the late Adam Walrad”. The family record rests on these abstracts; none of the original entries is in it. Jones gives no burial or place of death for Adam.

Adolf and Adam

Jones notes that Adolf and Adam often refer to the same man in colonial New York records, as with Adolph Thiel, who was listed as Adolph and married as Adam. On that ground he joins the Johann Adolf baptized at Runkel in 1700 to the Johann Adam of Schoharie in 1717 and the Adam Walrath of Stone Arabia and German Flatts. The name Adolf given to Henrich Walrath’s eldest son fits the identification. Jones also wondered whether a John Walrave who married Anna Ridder at the Albany Reformed church on 8 November 1721 was Johann Adolf; the family record does not adopt that marriage.

His father’s mission

Jones takes the story of the 1718 deputation from Walter Allen Knittle’s Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration (1937), which draws on British records and the autobiography of Johann Conrad Weiser. Scheff came back late in 1721 and Weiser in November 1723; Gerhardt Walrath, homesick, sailed for New York and died before he reached it. The family record places his death between 1718 and 1721.

The children

Only Anna Barbara and Maria Catharina are certain: the Stone Arabia Reformed church book calls each a daughter of the late Adam Walrad at her marriage. The other seven make up what Jones calls “a probable list”, built from the godparents and from who joined the church together. Jacob, Amalia and Lisabet Wallratt joined the Stone Arabia Reformed church, or were confirmed there, together on 27 May 1744; Isaac Paris, or Berry, stood sponsor twice in Jacob’s family and also to Anna Barbara Walrath Hillegas; Magdalena was a sponsor in Jacob’s family in 1762; Henrich was a sponsor at Stone Arabia in 1760; and Anna Margaretha is identified as the unnamed Walrath woman whom Pastor Sommer’s journal records marrying Conrad Pickert in June 1751. Jones writes that the loss of the Mohawk Valley church books makes the second and third Walrath generations “extremely difficult” to compile. Jacob’s place in the family rests on that deduction, and on a birth in 1723 that fits a father born in 1700.