♂Johann George Riechert

Johann George Riechert (about 1738 – buried 15 February 1786) was a Cöllmer, or free farmer, of Groß Neuendorf in the parish of Neukirch, Kreis Niederung, East Prussia^W, who drowned in the Gilge river at the age of 47. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his son Carl Rickert.

Marriage and family

Johann George Riechert and Anna Sophia Koppin were married at Neukirch in 1764. The marriage register lists them as entry 34 of that year, Johann George Richert of Altbagdahnen, a village of the parish, and Anna Sophia Koppin of Neuendorf, and gives no ages and no parents. Koppin is the feminine form of the surname Kopp, the -in ending the registers gave to a woman’s family name. Neukirch, like the rest of Kreis Niederung, has been part of the Kaliningrad region of Russia since 1945.

By 1785 the couple lived at Groß Neuendorf, where Johann George was a Cöllmer. Three of their children are known. A son, Carl Benjamin, was entered in the Neukirch baptismal register on 5 September 1773 under the parents’ names Johann Rieckert and Anna Sophia; the entry appears to place the family at Groß Neuendorf already. The index of the register records a daughter, Anna Sophia, baptized on 11 April 1775, and names her parents as Johan George Riechert and Sophia. A son, Jacob Heinrich, was born on 25 April 1785 and baptized on 1 May; the entry names the parents as Johan Riechert, a Cöllmer, and Anna Sophia Koppin, of Groß Neuendorf. No baptism of a child of the couple between 1764 and 1773 has been found in the index of the parish registers, which is incomplete.

Death

Johann George Riechert was buried at Neukirch on 15 February 1786, nine and a half months after the baptism of the couple’s son Jacob Heinrich. The burial register calls him a Cöllmer of Groß Neuendorf, aged 47, and gives the cause of death as “ertrunken im Gilgen Strom”, drowned in the Gilge, the southern arm of the river Memel; the river’s name is a good but not certain reading. The entry does not name his wife. His widow was most likely the Anna Sophia Riechertin who married Andreas Degling at Neukirch on 10 November 1797.

Notes

Origins

He was living at Altbagdahnen when he married, but his baptism has not been found and his parents are not known. His age at burial points to a birth between February 1738 and February 1739. The Neukirch baptisms of those months hold no Riechert son under any village; but for one entry, neither do the 1738 baptisms of Heinrichswalde, another parish of the district; and the index of the East Prussian church registers has no Johann George Riechert baptized anywhere in Kreis Niederung between 1728 and 1750. Riechert was among the commonest surnames of Neukirch parish, and several Riechert families were having children baptized there in the 1730s and 1740s, but none has been tied to him.

The link to Carl Rickert

No record names the parents of Carl Rickert, the father of Johann Friedrich Rickert (born 1803). Carl, written Riechert or Richert in the registers, is known only as a husband and father, between 1803 and 1820; no entry gives his age, and his marriage to Florentina Degling, about 1802, has not been found. The Kaukehmen marriages of 1800 to 1803 do not include it, and the Neukirch marriage registers for 1802 to 1818 do not survive. Carl Benjamin, the son baptized to this couple in 1773, is the only Carl tied to the household. Riechert was a common name in the parish, however, and at least one other Carl of about the right age, baptized in 1777 to Johann Michael Richert and Erdmuth, has not been ruled out.

The case for the link rests on the families around Carl. In 1797 the widow Anna Sophia Riechertin married Andreas Degling, probably the father of the Florentina Degling whom Carl married a few years later; if Carl was Anna Sophia’s son, he married his stepsister. In December 1804 Carl was a leaseholder at Lang Sköpen, in Kaukehmen parish, and Sköpen appears to be the village the 1797 marriage entry gives for Andreas Degling. Carl named the daughter born to him at the end of 1804 Johanne Sophia. In January 1813, at Neukirch, the godparents of his son Wilhelm Gustav were a Carl Noetzel and a Frau Boettcherin; a week earlier a Wilhelm Noetzel and a Maria Boettcherin had stood godparents to a son of Reinhold Kopp, a Cöllmer of Groß Neuendorf, whose wife was also a Boettcherin. These ties fit Carl’s being Anna Sophia Koppin’s son, but none of them proves it.

On the burial alone, the man buried in 1786 is only probably the father of Carl Benjamin. In its favor are the shared village, Groß Neuendorf; his standing as a Cöllmer of an age to father a child in 1773; and his death, which left Anna Sophia a widow well before her second marriage in 1797. Against it, or left open, are that the 1773 entry calls the father only Johann, that other Riechert households lived in the parish, among them a George Riechert at Jedwilkaiten, and that the burial names no wife. The marriage of 1764 and the baptism of 1785 make this part much stronger. Together they join the name Johann George to Anna Sophia Koppin and place Johann Riechert, a Cöllmer, with Anna Sophia Koppin at Groß Neuendorf less than a year before the burial, and three of the godparents’ families, von Gehr, Kröner or Groenert, and Gronau, appear at both the 1773 and the 1785 baptisms. A George Riechert whose wife was Maria Elisabeth Henningin was still having children baptized in 1787 and 1793, and was a different man.