♀Margaretha Scherer

Margaretha Scherer (died 1708) was a woman of Rheinweiler, a village on the Upper Rhine in Baden, Germany, who married Sigismundus Dossenbach there in 1659, had ten children with him between 1659 and 1674, and outlived him by nearly twenty-eight years. She was an ancestor of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Josephus Dossenbach (1665–1722): her sixth great-grandmother by the one, and her seventh great-grandmother by the other.

Marriage and family

Margaretha is said to have come from a place called Esch, which the records do not identify further. Sigismundus Dossenbach and Margaretha Scherer married at Rheinweiler on 28 April 1659. Rheinweiler belonged to the parish of Bamlach, the neighboring village, and its baptisms, marriages and burials were entered in the Bamlach church book. Their first child, Joannes, was baptized at Bamlach on 20 May 1659, three weeks after the wedding, and nine more followed over the next fifteen years, the last of them Catharina in May 1674. Josephus, through whom both lines of descent run, was the fifth, born in 1665. A son Joannes Jacobus, baptized in September 1660, most likely died young, since the name was given again to a son baptized in August 1669.

Widowhood and death

When Sigismundus died at Rheinweiler in 1680, their youngest child, Catharina, was six, and Josephus was fifteen. Margaretha survived him by nearly twenty-eight years, and was still living when Josephus married Anna Maria Carlin in 1693 and when six of their seven children were born. She died at Rheinweiler in 1708 and was presumably buried at Bamlach on 11 May that year.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through Josephus, who married Anna Maria Carlin at Rheinweiler in 1693, and part among their children. The first continues through their daughter Maria Eva Dossenbach (1715–1785) to her grandson Louis Bosler (1787–1831); the second runs through their son Ursus Dossenbach (1696–1781) and most likely through his daughter Maria Ursula Dossenbach (died 1807) to her granddaughter Magdalena Zähringer (born about 1790). The two lines meet again in Louis Oliver Bosler (1825–1909), whose father and mother, Louis Bosler and Magdalena Zähringer, were both descendants of Sigismundus and Margaretha.

Notes

Sources of the dates

The village family book^W is Felix Pöschl and Ingrid Kopf, Ortssippenbuch Bamlach-Rheinweiler 1630–1810 (Basel, 2006), online at online-ofb.de/bamlach, a compiled reconstitution of the two villages’ families from the parish registers. It gives years rather than full dates. It gives her marriage to Sigismundus Dosenbach at Rheinweiler in 1659, his death there in 1680 and hers in 1708, and lists their ten children, from Joannes in 1659 to Catharina in 1674, with the first Joannes Jacobus, born in 1660, dead before 1669.

Her origin

The family book calls her Margaretha Scherer of Esch, and gives her no birth and no parents. It does not say which of the places of that name is meant. FamilySearch’s index of the Freiburg Catholic Church Records holds no baptism of a Scherer at a place called Esch, and nothing ties her to any of the many Margaretha Scherers baptized in the collection between 1620 and 1645.

The marriage

The marriage is given here at Rheinweiler, the place the family book names, on 28 April 1659. Two FamilySearch indexes of the Bamlach register give the same day: the Freiburg Catholic Church Records index, and the collection Germany, Marriages, 1558–1929, which places the wedding at Bamlach and gives both bride and groom as born there, most likely the parish’s name rather than their birthplace. Neither index names the couple’s parents. Since Rheinweiler belonged to the parish of Bamlach, Bamlach is most likely where the marriage was entered in the church book, and Rheinweiler the couple’s village.

The church-book index

FamilySearch’s index of the Bamlach church book, in the Freiburg Catholic Church Records collection, holds one baptism for each of the couple’s ten children, the ten the family book lists, and no other child of the couple, from Joannes on 20 May 1659 to Catharina on 20 May 1674. The register pages themselves are not available. The mother’s surname is written in many ways, among them Scherring, Schwerz, Schewrig, Schwer and Schnerr. The same index holds her burial, as Margaritha Scherer, on 11 May 1708, and her husband’s on 5 August 1680, each in the year the family book gives.