♂Johann Jacob Caputzki

Johann Jacob Caputzki (died before 6 February 1718) was a villager from the Rhineland who is said to have come to New York with his wife and children among the Palatine^W emigrants of 1710, and who died there within eight years. He was probably the sixth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his daughter Anna Margaretha Caputzgi (born about 1697).

In Germany

His father, also named Johann Jacob Caputzki, lived at Eppstein, a village near Frankenthal on the west bank of the Rhine, and had died by 1697. By then the son was at Erfelden, across the river in the Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt^W.

On 25 July 1697 Hans Jacob Caputzki, “from Epstein near Franckenthal” and the son of the late Hans Jacob Caputzki, and Anna Magdalena Eckelmann did church penance together at Goddelau-Erfelden. The records do not explain the penance, and no marriage of the couple was entered in the register there, but later church books in Germany and America call her his wife.

The couple had seven known children, born between about 1697 and 1712. A daughter, Anna Dorothea, was born at Erfelden on 30 October 1698. A son, Johann Jacob, was baptized at Dienheim, near Oppenheim, on 13 January 1701; the register there noted the father as from Rudelsheim and the mother as of the Augsburg Confession^W, that is, a Lutheran. Back at Erfelden, a second Johann Jacob was born on 27 June 1703 and buried the following June, not quite a year old, and Johann Jost was born on 20 November 1707.

New York

The family was in New York by 1 July 1710, when Johann Jacob Caputscher first appears on the Hunter Lists, the subsistence rolls kept for the Palatine settlers under Governor Robert Hunter^W. Their son Conradt was baptized at the Kingston Reformed church on 6 May 1712. As Jacob Kapouche, Johann Jacob was naturalized at Kingston on 8 and 9 September 1715, and a register of the Palatine families made about 1716 or 1717 lists Jacob Cabbutzer, with his wife and children, at Wormsdorf. On 14 October 1716 the daughters Anna Margaretha and Anna Dorothea were confirmed at Rhinebeck, and the West Camp Lutheran register noted that their father was Reformed^W.

Johann Jacob was dead by 6 February 1718, when Anna Margaretha married Georg Salzmann, a widower from Stollberg in Saxony, at West Camp. The register named her the surviving daughter of the late Johann Jakob Caputzgi, “gewesenen Innwohners zu Erbelheim am Rhein”, formerly an inhabitant of Erbelheim on the Rhine, under the princes of Darmstadt. His widow, Anna Magdalena, appears on the tax rolls of the North Ward of Dutchess County from 1717/18 to 1720/21.

Notes

Sources

Nearly everything known of the family comes from Henry Z. Jones Jr.’s The Palatine Families of New York (1985), volume 1, pages 118 and 119, under John Jacob Caputscher. Jones abstracts the church books of Weisenheim am Sand (for Eppstein), Goddelau-Erfelden and Dienheim in Germany and of the West Camp Lutheran and Kingston Reformed churches in New York, together with the Hunter Lists, the Kingston naturalizations of 1715, the Simmendinger Register (the list of Palatine families of about 1716-1717) and the Dutchess County tax lists. The German words of the 1718 marriage are quoted from the West Camp Lutheran church book. Jones names Goddelau-Erfelden, Dienheim and Eppstein as the family’s homes in Germany; the 1718 entry writes the place as Erbelheim am Rhein.

The name

The name is spelled a different way in almost every record: Caputzki and Caputzgi in the church books, Cabutschke at Eppstein, Caputscher on the Hunter Lists, Kapouche at the naturalization, Cabbutzer in the Simmendinger Register and Kapontsier on the Dutchess County rolls. This page uses Caputzki for him and Caputzgi for his daughter.

The descent

Ora Emogene Walrath’s line runs from Anna Margaretha Caputzgi and Georg Salzmann through a daughter, Maria Magdalena, the wife of Johannes Schultz of the Mohawk Valley. That one link comes from other family trees, which make Maria Magdalena a Salzmann born on 20 July 1729, and not from a church record. Jones gives Johannes Schultz’s wife only as Maria Magdalena, without a maiden name. A Henrich Salzman stood godfather at the baptism of her son Henrich at Stone Arabia in 1766, which fits a brother of hers but does not prove the link.

Dates not used

Some online trees give him a birth in 1665 and a death in 1717; neither date comes with a source.