Johann Müller
Johann Müller was a farmer and Bürger of Einbach, a small village in the Odenwald hills of northern Baden. A Bürger held the citizen's rights of his village, which carried a share in its common land and a voice in its affairs. He was also a Gerichtsmann, one of the jurors who sat on the village court with the headman. He was born about 1746, by his age when he married for the second time.
Einbach had no church of its own. Its baptisms and marriages were kept in the books of the Catholic parish of Limbach, and its weddings and burials took place at the church in the neighbouring village of Waldhausen. From 1810 the parish priest also kept a Standesbuch for the state, a civil register of births, marriages and deaths, and that is where most of his life is written down.
His first wife was Maria Barbara, born about 1754. Their marriage is not in the Limbach church book and probably took place about 1770 to 1776. Their son Franz Joseph married Anna Maria Schwab of Donebach on 29 July 1800, and the marriage entry names the groom's father as "Joannis Müller." Johann was a witness at the burial of his granddaughter Maria Anna in 1810.
In 1814 he lost his wife and his son. Maria Barbara died at Einbach at eleven at night on 8 January 1814, aged sixty, and the priest entered her as the wife of "Johann Müller Gerichtsmann alda," Gerichtsmann of that place. By the summer his son Franz Joseph was dead too, though he does not appear in Einbach's death register and probably died away from the village.
On 26 July 1814 Franz Joseph's widow, Anna Maria, married Sebastian Schork, a farmer of twenty-eight, at Waldhausen. The priest excused her the usual year of mourning. Johann stood as one of the two witnesses, entered as "Johann Müller der Braut Schwiegervater," the bride's father-in-law. The other was Franz Leimen, a farmer, and the priest described them as "beide Bürger in Einbach," both citizens of Einbach.
Less than three months later Johann married again himself. On 17 October 1814 at Waldhausen, "nach getrennter Ehe mit der verstorbenen Maria Barbara Müllerin in Einbach," his marriage to the late Maria Barbara now ended, Johann Müller, widower, sixty-eight, an inhabitant of Einbach, married Maria Margaretha, a widow of sixty-one from Langenelz. Her late husband's name is hard to read in the entry. The witnesses were Michael Thomas and Franz Peter Schwarz, a tailor.
Two men of the same name lived at Einbach in these years, and both had wives called Maria Barbara. The other, Johann Adam Müller, a citizen and farmer, was dead by June 1814, when his widow Maria Barbara died aged fifty-seven. She had been born Maria Barbara Münch, baptised at Limbach in 1756. A dead man cannot have stood witness in July, so the father-in-law at the wedding was the Gerichtsmann, widowed in January. When or where Johann died is not known. He was living in October 1814.
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Cite: Heirology, "Johann Müller (b. 1746)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/johann-muller-1746-7ddbfe.