♂Sigismundus Dossenbach

Sigismundus Dossenbach (died 1680) was a man of Rheinweiler, a village on the Upper Rhine in Baden, Germany, who married Margaretha Scherer there in 1659 and had ten children with her over the next fifteen years. He was an ancestor of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Josephus Dossenbach (1665–1722): her sixth great-grandfather by the one, and her seventh great-grandfather by the other.

Early life

Sigismundus was probably the boy baptized at Bamlach on 28 March 1641 as Sigismud Dessenbach, a son of Hanss Dossenbach and Anna Kürber. Rheinweiler belonged to the parish of Bamlach, the neighboring village, and its baptisms, marriages and burials were entered in the Bamlach church book.

Marriage and family

Sigismundus Dossenbach and Margaretha Scherer married at Rheinweiler on 28 April 1659. 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.

Death

Sigismundus died at Rheinweiler in 1680 and was presumably buried at Bamlach on 5 August that year. His youngest child, Catharina, was six, and Josephus was fifteen. Margaretha survived him by nearly twenty-eight years and died at Rheinweiler in 1708.

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 writes his name Sigismundus Dosenbach and gives his death at Rheinweiler in 1680, his marriage there in 1659 to Margaretha Scherer of Esch, and her death at Rheinweiler in 1708. It lists their ten children, from Joannes in 1659 to Catharina in 1674, and gives the first Joannes Jacobus, born in 1660, as dead before 1669. It gives neither husband nor wife a birth or parents.

His baptism and parents

FamilySearch’s index of the Bamlach church book holds one baptism of a Sigismundus Dossenbach between 1633 and 1658: Sigismud Dessenbach, baptized on 28 March 1641, a son of Hanss Dessenbach and of an Anna whose surname the index reads as Rüeber. The family book has the same child, born at Rheinweiler in 1641, as a son of Hanss Dosenbach and Anna Kürber, but keeps him apart from the husband of Margaretha Scherer: it gives the boy of 1641 no marriage, children or death, gives the husband no birth, and makes no remark joining them. They are taken here to be one man on the name, the parish and the dates. If they were, he was eighteen at his marriage. His parentage is therefore probable rather than proved.

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: Joannes on 20 May 1659, Joannes Jacobus on 8 September 1660, Eva on 23 December 1661, Anna Maria on 23 December 1663, Josephus on 22 March 1665, Anna on 2 December 1667, Joannes Jacobus on 14 August 1669, Christoph on 5 January 1671, Theodericus, written Dietricus, on 24 July 1672, and Catharina on 20 May 1674. The register pages themselves are not available. The parents’ names are written in many ways: the father’s forename as Sigmundus, Amundus or Ismudus in some entries and the surname once as Dessenbach, and the mother’s surname as Scherring, Schwerz, Schewrig, Schwer or Schnerr. The same index holds his burial on 5 August 1680 and Margaretha’s, as Margaritha Scherer, on 11 May 1708, each in the year the family book gives.