♂Louis Bosler

Louis Bosler (about 1786 – 28 June 1831) was a farmer of Rheinweiler, a village on the Upper Rhine in the district of Müllheim in the Grand Duchy of Baden^W, recorded there as Aloys Basler, the father of at least nine children, four of them born between 1820 and 1828. He was the great-great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his son Louis Oliver Bosler (1825–1909), Louis Oliver’s daughter Anna Lucy Bosler (1860–1910) and her son Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934).

Life

A FamilySearch index entry for the marriage of Aloysius Basler and Magdalena Zehringer at Bamlach on 22 January 1810 names his parents as Fidel Basler and Gertrud Spony and hers as Christian Zehringer and Jakobea Spony; the register entry itself is not available. The index gives him as 23 and a native of Rheinweiler.

Five daughters were born to the couple before 1820. Katharina was born on 12 July 1812 and baptized the next day. Four daughters in four years were each named Magdalena, the mother’s own name: the first, born on 17 April 1814, was baptized at birth by the midwife and died the same day; the second, born on 16 July 1815, was baptized at home; the third, born on 10 June 1816, was also baptized at birth by the midwife; and the fourth, born on 25 September 1817, died on 5 October that year, when the register gives her age as twelve days.

The rest of what is known of him comes from the birth registers of Rheinweiler, in the government copies of the Catholic registers kept for the Grand Duchy and signed by the priest at neighboring Bamlach. They name his wife as Magdalena Zähringer and their children as Joseph, born on 5 March 1820; Gertrud, born on 23 February 1822; Aloys, born and baptized on 7 April 1825; and Maria Magdalena, born on 8 July 1828. In 1820 the couple are called Bürgersleute of Rheinweiler, citizens of the village, and in 1822 and 1825 he is described as an Ackermann, a farmer working his own land.

The son born on 7 April 1825 is identified with Louis Oliver Bosler, whose Illinois obituary of 1909 gives his birth in Baden on that same day, and who signed his 1849 marriage bond at Louisville, Kentucky, “Alois Basler”. The identification rests on the match of name, day and region; no document yet names both the Rheinweiler child and the emigrant.

The name under which he is known in the family record, Louis Bosler, is therefore not one he is recorded as using. In the registers he is Aloys or Alois Basler, the German form behind the “Louis” his son adopted in America, and Bosler is the American spelling the son’s family took up; the son’s own family still carved Basler on his wife’s gravestone in 1888. In 1880 his son told the census taker that both his parents had been born in Baden.

He died at Rheinweiler on 28 June 1831, at nine in the evening, aged 45, and was buried on 30 June. At the time of his death he was the village’s Gemeinschaffner, or municipal treasurer. The two witnesses were his kin by marriage: Anton Dosenbach had married his sister Gertrud Basler in 1812, and Jakob Zähringer was probably the brother of his wife, Magdalena.

Notes

FamilySearch’s index files the Rheinweiler births under the parish of Bamlach, and earlier accounts placed the family there.

A shared online family tree at FamilySearch gives the father as an Aloys Bassler born in 1787. That birth year agrees with the age of 23 in the 1810 marriage index, but both are index-grade and neither has been confirmed against a register.

His son’s wife, Marie Viktor, is recorded under two surnames: the clerk who wrote the 1849 marriage bond appears to begin her surname with an F, and the county index reads it as Fichtor, while her gravestone reads Vicktor. Whether these are one name written by different hands is not settled.

The death and burial are entered in the government copy of the Catholic register of Rheinweiler for 1831, as the first entry of that year. Its age of 45 would place his birth between mid-1785 and mid-1786, a little earlier than the age of 23 given at his marriage in 1810 suggests; the two agree only if he was born in the first half of 1786. The 1812 marriage of Anton Dosenbach and Gertrud Basler is known from the indexed Bamlach register, which gives the bride’s parents as Fidel Basler and Gertrud Spony. Jakob Zähringer is taken to be Magdalena’s brother Johann Jakob, born in 1788 at Rheinweiler to the same parents as she, on the matching name and village.

The birth year of 1786 and the birthplace of Rheinweiler come from the Ortssippenbuch Bamlach-Rheinweiler 1630–1810, by Felix Pöschl and Ingrid Kopf (Basel, 2006), a compiled reconstruction from the parish registers that gives years only, with a few months at most.