♂Johann Jacob Caputzki

Johann Jacob Caputzki (died before 25 July 1697) is said to have been an inhabitant of Eppstein, a village just south of Frankenthal on the west bank of the Rhine, and the father of the Palatine^W emigrant of the same name. He was probably the seventh great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his son Johann Jacob Caputzki (died before 6 February 1718).

Two church entries for his sons are all that is known of him. In 1686, when his son Johann Friedrich married Eva Catharina Bemm on 14 August, the Weisenheim am Sand register, which kept the entries for Eppstein, named the groom, still unmarried, as the son of “Johan Jacob Cabutschke - inhabitant at Eppstein”. By 25 July 1697 he was dead: on that day his son Hans Jacob, “from Epstein near Franckenthal”, was entered in the Goddelau-Erfelden church book as the son of “the late Hans Jacob Caputzki”. Nothing is known of his wife.

Notes

Sources

Everything known of him comes from Henry Z. Jones Jr.’s The Palatine Families of New York (1985), volume 1, page 118, under John Jacob Caputscher, which abstracts the church books of Weisenheim am Sand and Goddelau-Erfelden. Jones calls him the earliest known ancestor of the American line and places Eppstein 3 km south of Frankenthal. The quoted words are Jones’s English renderings of the two entries.

The descent

Ora Emogene Walrath’s line runs from his son Johann Jacob through a granddaughter, Anna Margaretha Caputzgi, who married Georg Salzmann at West Camp in 1718, and then through a Maria Magdalena, the wife of Johannes Schultz of the Mohawk Valley. That Maria Magdalena was a daughter of Anna Margaretha and Georg Salzmann comes from other family trees, not from a church record.

Dates not used

An online family tree gives him a birth in 1647, which would make him eighteen at the 1665 birth the same tree gives his son Johann Jacob; the date comes with no source.