Waldburga Frey\Freyin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Waldburga Frey (also rendered Freyin) (1580–1613), an 11× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth, parentage, marriage to Leonhardt Mühle, her daughter Elsbeth, her death at Göppingen in Württemberg, and the broader context of life in early 17th-century southern Germany.

Waldburga Frey, sometimes recorded in the Germanic feminine form as Freyin, was born in the year 1580 and departed this life on the second day of December, 1613, at Göppingen in the Duchy of Württemberg, in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. She was a daughter of Marti Frey, and through him carried forward a name long established among the burghers and country folk of the Swabian uplands.

In the course of her relatively brief life, Waldburga was joined in marriage to Leonhardt Mühle — a surname also entered in the older records as Mule or zu der Mule, after the millhouses from which such names commonly derived. From this union came at least one daughter known to the present record, Elsbeth zu der Mule, born in 1604 and herself destined to live but a short span, dying in 1627 at the age of three and twenty.

Waldburga's days unfolded in a Württemberg shaped by the Lutheran Reformation, which had taken firm hold in the duchy during the preceding century. Göppingen, situated along the river Fils beneath the heights of the Hohenstaufen, was in this period a modest market town under ducal administration, its inhabitants subject to the ordinary rhythms of parish life, seasonal trade, and the ever-present uncertainties of plague and harvest. Within a mere five years of her passing, the region would be drawn into the cataclysm of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), a calamity which would devastate Württemberg's population and from which her descendants in the Mühle line would have to make their way.

That Waldburga died at approximately three and thirty years of age, leaving behind a young daughter not yet ten, was sadly not uncommon in an age when maternal mortality and epidemic disease bore heavily upon women of her station.

Waldburga Frey stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as an 11× great-grandmother.