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Ochsenburg and the Gugler and Weiss Families, 1749 to 1830

Ochsenburg

Ochsenburg grew up as a fortified hamlet below a medieval castle and is first named in a record in 1231. It held town rights (Stadtrecht) until 1807, but it stayed small. Through the twentieth century it never had much more than 600 people: 532 in 1939, 574 in 1945 and 589 in 1970, and 628 in 2006. In the high Middle Ages it belonged to the lords of Magenheim. In the fourteenth century it passed to Württemberg, which granted it as a fief to the lords of Sternenfels. Their crest of 1564, for Georg von Sternenfels and his wife, Ursula Margaretha von Helmstaett, still stands over the cemetery gate. Of the Sternenfels castle only the castle wine cellar (Schlosskellerei) of 1569 and the granary (Fruchtkasten) of 1771 remain, and carved coats of arms from both are built into village houses. A crest stone on the village square remembers Carl Alexander von Sternenfels and his wife, whom a translated description of the stone names as Maria Elvira Wetzel. Wetzel is also the name given, provisionally, to Carolina Barbara, the wife of John E. Knoll of Marktleuthen (see Knoll and Weiss Families), four hundred kilometers away. The two women are almost certainly unconnected.

Ochsenburg lay in the district (Oberamt) of Güglingen until 1810 and in the district of Brackenheim from 1810 to 1938, which is why Caroline’s baptism record places it in “OA. Brackenheim.” From 1938 it belonged to the county (Landkreis) of Heilbronn. On 1 January 1971 Ochsenburg joined its neighbor Leonbronn, the home of the Gugler family, to form Burgbronn, and on 1 January 1975 Burgbronn became part of Zaberfeld. Ochsenburg no longer governs itself. Leonbronn and Ochsenburg have shared one parish for more than fifty years.

The church, the Margaretenkirche (St. Margaret’s Church), was rebuilt in its present form in 1727 and 1728 under Ludwig Bernhard von Sternenfels, because the older building was no longer safe. The builders kept the old choir tower, a Gothic pulpit on a Renaissance column, a bell cast in 1558 by Hans Neiffer and a baptismal font dated 1478. The Weiss, Schmid, Haidle and Heinrich children of this chapter who were baptized at Ochsenburg, Caroline among them in March 1857, were baptized at that font.

The Gugler and Weiss Families, 1749 to 1830

Most of what is known about Caroline’s ancestors comes from the parish registers of Ochsenburg, Leonbronn, Kleingartach, Ehningen and Adelberg. They name her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents and most of the generation above them. A family ancestor report and pedigree charts, printed from genealogy software about 2016 and bound into the family book compiled in 2015 and 2016, add dates and a further generation. Its generations beyond Caroline’s parents carry no stated source, and the registers bear out its first four generations but not the deeper ones. Where this chapter gives a fact from the report alone, it says so.

On 29 July 1749, at Ochsenburg, Johann Jacob Gugler married Anna, the daughter of Johann Georg Heinrich, a citizen (Bürger) and vintner of Ochsenburg. The groom was the son of Johann Georg Gugler, a citizen of Leonbronn, who was probably dead by then. Johann Jacob was born in 1725 and Anna on 11 September 1723. Her father was born at Ochsenburg in December 1700 and died there on 29 March 1762. The compiled report calls the bride Anna Maria Heinrich, names Johann Georg Heinrich’s wife as Anna Barbara Bauer, born at Ochsenburg in 1700, and gives Johann Georg Gugler’s birth as about 1700.

The couple’s daughter Rosina Margaretha Gugler was born at Leonbronn on 29 August 1750 and baptized there. A Johann Jacob Gugler died at Ochsenburg on 16 April 1754 and was buried two days later, and he is probably her father, so Rosina probably lost him before she was four. Anna Helena, “Johann Jacob Gugler’s little daughter,” died at Ochsenburg on 19 October 1756, aged three years and seven months, and was buried two days later. She was probably Rosina’s sister, born on 23 March 1753.

Rosina never married. On 19 July 1782, when she was thirty-one, she gave birth at Ochsenburg to a son, Johann Friedrich, who was baptized the next day. In the baptism entry she named his father: Wilhelm Weiss, a journeyman carpenter from Württemberg. The words that follow are hard to read and seem to say that the man did not acknowledge the child, or could not be found. Rosina’s word is the whole record of Wilhelm Weiss. Nothing gives his birth, his age or his home town, and the Weiss surname in this family begins with him. The parish’s family registers (Familienregister) repeat her statement as hearsay: one gives the father “(allegedly)” as Wilhelm Weiss, a journeyman carpenter from Württemberg, and the other says “The father is said to have been Wilhelm Weiß”. In 1783 Rosina stood godmother as “Rosina Guglerin, ledig” (single), and her own sheet in the family register enters Johann Friedrich as her one child born outside marriage (“hat einen spurium”). She died at Ochsenburg on 27 December 1816 at seven in the morning, aged 66, entered as “an unmarried woman” (“Eine ledige Weibsperson”), and was buried on 1 January 1817.

Rosina’s son Johann Friedrich Weiss became a citizen and farmer of Ochsenburg. On 19 September 1805 he married Christiana Hillbronner, the daughter of Johann Alexander Hillbronner and Regina Barbara (the surname is a doubtful reading). She died on 18 October 1809. On 15 May 1810 he married Margaretha Schuele, born at Ochsenburg on 31 January 1789, the daughter of Christoph Friedrich Schuele and Anna Catharina Wild. Her mother’s surname and her father’s home, which may be Oberriexingen, are hard to read. Johann Friedrich died at Ochsenburg on 29 August 1830, aged 48, six weeks after his youngest son was born. Margaretha lived until 27 April 1863.

Johann Friedrich had thirteen children, the first two by Christiana and the rest by Margaretha. Seven of them died as children.

The compiled report gives Christiana Barbara’s death as 30 August 1807. It also lists a Margretha Elisabetha, born in 1799, six years before the first marriage, who died at Löchgau on 4 July 1800. The registers do not list her among the thirteen.

The family registers tie each generation to the next. Rosina’s death entry points to her own sheet, her sheet to her son’s household, and that household to the page of his son Johann, born on 22 May 1825, where Caroline is entered. The descent from Rosina Margaretha Gugler through Johann Friedrich Weiss and Johann Weiss to Caroline is almost certain.

Of Johann’s brothers and sisters, Jacob Friedrich married Magdalena Christine Götz, whom the compiled report gives as born in 1826, and they had at least eight children. Margaretha married Johann Georg Thumlert (1822 to 1895), a shepherd, the son of Johann Friedrich Thumlert, and they had nine children from 1851 to 1869. Her father-in-law, born in 1796, left for North America on 14 April 1863, at sixty-six. He gave up his citizenship in 1866, came back in 1867, and died at Kleebronn in 1879. The youngest of Johann’s brothers, Jacob, went to America too; his story closes this chapter.