Elisabetha Wagoner

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elisabetha Wagoner (1696–1728), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in the Rhineland, her death in Baden-Wuerttemberg, her daughter Sussana Ulrich, and contextual notes on early 18th-century life in the German southwest. Notable: she belongs to the deep German-rooted branch of the family, predating later emigration.

Elisabetha Wagoner (1696–1728) was born on the 22nd of January 1696 in Kastellaun, in the Rhein-Hunsrück district of what is today Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany. Her short life unfolded entirely within the German-speaking lands of the upper Rhine, a region whose hills, vineyards, and small fortified towns had for centuries served as both a cultural crossroads and a corridor for the armies of Europe. By the time of her birth, the Rhineland was still recovering from the devastations of the Nine Years' War, during which French forces had ravaged much of the Palatinate and the Hunsrück. Towns such as Kastellaun bore the marks of that destruction well into the new century, and the families who remained — among them the Wagoners — were of the stock that endured repeated upheaval, plague, and resettlement.

The records preserve little of Elisabetha's daily life, yet what is known places her within the rhythms of the late Baroque countryside: a world of parish registers, agricultural labor, small craft trades, and tightly woven village kinship. At some point before 1727, she removed southward into the Grand Duchy of Baden, settling in Schriesheim in present-day Baden-Württemberg, a wine-growing town along the Bergstraße at the foot of the Odenwald. There, in 1727, she bore a daughter, Sussana Ulrich (1727–1812), through whom the family line would in time descend across the Atlantic to America.

Elisabetha died sometime after 1728 in Schriesheim, still a young woman of about thirty-two. Her brief span notwithstanding, she stands as a critical link in the deepest reaches of the family's German ancestry, anchoring the compiler's paternal-grandfather line firmly in the soil of the Rhineland and the Bergstraße generations before any thought of emigration to the New World.

Elisabetha was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-paternal (PP) line.