Maria Ursula

She came to Pennsylvania in the same year as Adam Romich, already hollowed out.

Maria Ursula Wanner had been born in February 1699 in Rohrbach, a village near Sinsheim in the Kraichgau — not far from the hills where John Adam Romich had grown up.³⁴ What her early years were like, the Allemengel Moravian congregation's account of her life notes with a kind of quiet sorrow: "Of her childhood little is known except that very early she went to live with strangers and suffered many hardships."

In 1726, she married Peter Krämer, a glazier. They had four children in six years of marriage. All four died in childhood. Then, in 1732, came the crossing.

At some point during the Atlantic voyage, Peter Krämer killed himself. The circumstances are not recorded. The fact is stated plainly in the congregation's account of her life, written after her own death decades later: in 1732, as they were coming to America, her husband committed suicide at sea.³⁵

She was 33 years old. Every child she had carried was dead. Her husband was dead. The ship was still at sea.

She landed in Philadelphia and remained there through the winter and into 1733. What those months were like — a German-speaking widow in a port city, among strangers — the record does not say. She survived them.

John Adam Romich, meanwhile, had buried Agnes Margaretha and was managing his surviving children in a country he had arrived in only months before. He had been a Hofbauer in Ittlingen. He was now a widower in Pennsylvania with seven children.

On June 19, 1733, the two of them married. The record of the ceremony appears in the register kept by the Rev. Caspar Stoever, one of the few Lutheran ministers then serving the scattered German communities of southeastern Pennsylvania.³⁶ John Adam noted the marriage in his memoir: he had married a second time to Maria Ursula Wanner, with whom he had two sons and three daughters.

The congregation's account of Maria Ursula's life puts it differently — and more fully. It describes 34 years of happy marriage.

That phrase may belong to the congregation's formal conventions. It may also be accurate. They were together until her death in December 1766. He outlived her by less than two years, dying July 11, 1768.

Maria Ursula brought into that marriage a history of loss so complete it is difficult to comprehend across three centuries. She had been separated from her own childhood before she could fully belong to it. She had buried four children and a husband. She was starting over at 34, with a man who had seven living children of his own, in a country where neither of them yet knew the roads.

In 1762, both of them joined the Moravian church. He had resisted for years — the congregation record notes that when his son Heinrich first joined, John Adam had been openly displeased. But he came, eventually, "to see no harm in this, but rather a great service to his soul." Maria Ursula is not separately quoted on the matter. She is simply there, as she had always been.

She died on Dec. 21, 1766, after ten days of illness. A severe cough had turned to pneumonia. The congregation at Allemengel recorded her life carefully, accounting the family she and John Adam had extended: over 100 persons among their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

* * *

In Ittlingen, the church books went on. Philip Balthasar's descendants filled the pages for another century and more — through the Bürgerlisten and the lease records and the civic offices, all the way to the two sisters who showed Joan Reed the view from the hillside house in August 1999.

The sisters' parents had built them a new house on the edge of town, up on the slope overlooking the valley. That was where they lived now. The old house near the Rathaus had been sold out of the family in the 1960s. Whether the building standing there today is the original Romich house or a later one built on the same ground, no one in Ittlingen can say for certain.

Joan flew home to California. The sisters walked back up the hill to their house.

The house near the Rathaus stood where it has always stood.