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John Adam married in Ittlingen around 1712. In the memoir he dictated to his Moravian congregation in old age, he noted the event with characteristic brevity: "In the year 1712 I married Agnes Margaretha Bernhard."18 He gave her name and the year and moved on.
She was from Ittlingen. The church register records her birth on Dec. 2, 1687 — the eldest daughter of Nicolaus Bernhard and his wife, Anna Elisabetha, née Huber.19 Her father Nicolaus was a respected citizen whose name appears across the town's records. Her mother's Huber surname is confirmed by the burial entry for Anna Elisabetha Bernhardin in December 1755 — a primary-source record examined from the Ittlingen Kirchenbuch in June 2026.
The Bernhard and Romig families were neighbors in the fullest sense of the term: neighbors on the same street, neighbors in the same feudal district, fee-holders of adjacent named farmsteads under the same lordship. Agnes Margaretha was 24 when she married. John Adam was 23. She had twenty years ahead of her in that house near the Rathaus.
Agnes Margaretha is present in every baptismal entry in the church register, always identified simply as "ux" — uxor, wife. She does not speak in the record. She exists in it as a constant, unremarkable presence: the woman who bore nine children in nineteen years and is otherwise silent in every surviving document until she disappears entirely from the record on the far side of the Atlantic.
The ancestral home of the Bernhardt family in Ittlingen. Photograph by Joan Reed.