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While John Adam built his family, his brother Philip Balthasar built his civic career.
By 1734, two years after his brother sailed, Philip Balthasar's daughter Anna Maria was baptized — and for the first time the church register calls him something new: "Philipp Balthasar Romich, des Raths." Councilman. In 1751 he was Feldrichter — Field Judge — supervising the renewal of Ittlingen's boundary stones in a formal civic ceremony attended by the full community. In 1752 he sat on the Ortsgericht, the village court of 12 sworn men, as one of the civic leaders of the town. That same year, he co-leased the Mayleshof — the great farmstead of Ittlingen — from the Gemmingen-Hornberg lords.28
His family stayed. And flourished. His descendants lived in Ittlingen through the 18th and 19th centuries; an Adam Romich served as Bürgermeister — mayor — of Ittlingen from approximately 1844 to 1855.29 Joan Reed found the end of that line in August 1999: the two sisters, the last of the Philip Balthasar branch, who had kept coming home to Ittlingen from Heidelberg every weekend for 50 years.