Johann Kaspar Schwab
Johann Kaspar Schwab was the Vogt of Donebach, a village in the Catholic parish of Mudau in the Odenwald hills of northern Baden. The Vogt was the village headman. He kept order, answered for the village to the officials of the lord and later of the state, and sat at the head of the village court. In the church books the same office appears as Schultheiß, or in Latin as praetor. The clerks of the time wrote his village as Dumbach.
He was baptised at Mudau on 6 January 1750. The priest entered him in Latin as "Joannes Casparus Schwab," son of "Michaelis Schwab" and "Catharinae," that is, of Michael Schwab and his wife Catharina. The sixth of January is the feast of the Epiphany, when the Church remembers the three kings, and Caspar is the name tradition gives to one of them. A sister, Anna Maria, was baptised at Mudau on 15 September 1755. On 7 June 1774 he married Agnes Müller, daughter of Jacob Müller, at Mudau. The Latin entry calls him "Casparus Schwab, son of Michaelis Schwab," and her "Agnete Müller, daughter of Jacobi Müller." He was about twenty-four.
Their daughter Anna Maria was born about 1777. Another daughter, Agnes, was born about 1787 and married Franz Galm on 2 March 1813, with "Kaspar Schwab" and "Agnes Müller" entered as her parents. A Franciscus Josephus Schwab, son of Caspar and Agnes, married another Agnes Müller at Mudau on 23 October 1798 and was probably a son.
Anna Maria married Franz Müller of Einbach, a few miles off, on 29 July 1800. The entry names her father as "Casparus Schwab." He appears as "Schultheis, praetor" of Donebach in 1800, and as "resignierter Schultheis in Dumbach" by 1813, the headman who had resigned. He would then have been about sixty-three.
He died at Donebach at seven in the evening on 11 January 1825. The assistant priest at Mudau entered it as death number five of the year: "Im Jahre eintausend achthundert fünf und zwanzig den eilften Januar abends sieben Uhr starb nicht versehen Johann Kaspar Schwab, einst Vogt und Bürger zu Dumbach, fünf und siebenzig Jahre alt, und wurde den dreizehnten morgens neun Uhr vom Pfarrgehülfen Mißler begraben. Zeugen der Leiche sind: Melchior Schwarzmann, Michael Müller von da." In English: in the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five, on the eleventh of January at seven in the evening, Johann Kaspar Schwab, formerly Vogt and citizen of Dumbach, seventy-five years old, died unprovided. He was buried on the thirteenth at nine in the morning by the assistant priest Mißler. The witnesses of the body were Melchior Schwarzmann and Michael Müller, both of that place. He had died five days after the seventy-fifth anniversary of his baptism, so the priest's "seventy-five years old" was exact.
Nicht versehen, unprovided, means that he died without the last sacraments of the Catholic Church. A priest had not reached him, which usually means the death came suddenly. Sixteen years later, when his daughter Anna Maria died at Einbach, the priest still identified her by his village: "geboren Schwab von Dumbach," born a Schwab of Donebach.
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Cite: Heirology, "Johann Kaspar Schwab (1750-1825)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/johann-kaspar-schwab-1750-1825-1596ff.