I was born in the small town of Kirn because my grandparents lived in a village nearby (after inheriting the house that Johanna built for her retirement) and for the first 40 years of my life I believed I was the first in the family to be born there - and even the first to have any life event there. Only after the arrival of online family history did we discover the cluster of craftsmen active in Kirn before 1700, and from these we built a slightly wobbly connection to the first Lutheran priest of the town Peter Siegel, who studied with Martin Luther and was a significant enough person in history for me to get him into Wikipedia.
The church at Kirn, where Peter Siegel was the first Lutheran priest, and Balthasar Orth his deputy and then his successor. Also, where Peter Siegel was buried in 1560, and where I was baptised four centuries later.
Source: Wikipedia / Von H. Helmlechner - Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 4.0
Now, as I've been digging around the Weiß Chronicles, I have discovered a new lineage also leading to Kirn (number 68 in the ancestry of Anna Katharina Andrae). Hilariously, it leads us to the second Lutheran vicar of the town, Balthasar Orth, who was Peter Siegel's deputy (Diakon) for a few years and then succeeded him after his death in 1560. One of Balthasar's sons took on the same job a few years after his father's death in 1569. So that's two holders of same job in the family tree and a third in the extended family. Oh and two direct ancestors working together, whose lineages only meet more than 300 years later (Imig and Kauer, so the children of the station master of Adamsweiler are the first people we know of who are descendants of both Siegel and Orth).
Reasons enough to draw up short biographies of Balthasar and son (also,I do love the name Balthasar, not sure why!).
Johann Balthasar Orth
Johann Balthasar Orth was born in Bingen (where the river Nahe meets the Rhine) around 1526.
He is number IV-43 in this very amazing Orth family tree, which I suspect is so exceptionally well-researched in part because it feeds into the ancestry of Goethe in three different lineages. Apparently there are three different versions of just how exactly Johann Balthasar is related to the founding couple, so I won't commit to any of them.
Around 1555 he married a woman called Maria about whom we know absolutely nothing else.
He had nine children who survived into adulthood, listed here under V-24 to V-32. Confusingly, two of them are called Jakob (the elder and the younger). Jakob the elder, born at Kirn in 1550, studied in Strasbourg and Marburg and became the vicar of Kirn in 1577 (see his CV below).
Balthasar Orth became Kaplan (deputy to the vicar Peter Siegel) in 1555, and Siegel's successor in 1560. In the history of the church and parish of Kirn, Ulrich Hauth doesn't mention any noteworthy details of Orth's time as a vicar.
After only eight years as a vicar, he died at Kirn 5.1.1569, aged only around 43. I'm not sure how his widow managed with nine children, but they seem to have done quite well. The eight sons all rose to some sort of officialdom, but we don't know what became of the only daughter, Anna, who was mentioned at Kastellaun in 1590
The son who carried on the lineage relevant to my ancestry was V-30 Heinrich Orth, a court official (Amtmann) who married Katharina Caesar, also from a clergy family (see her ancestry here).
Jakob Orth the elder
He was born in Kirn in 1550, studied in Strasbourg and Marburg, became the priest of the rulers of Kyrburg and Dhaun in 1577, then the superintendent of the Rheingrafen and their court preacher, and finally vicar of Kirn in 1577.
He was a co-author of the first Lutheran "Kirchenordnung" for the area, together with Albrecht von Hellbach. This rulebook specifying the details of a Christian lifestyle (with sanctions if you didn't go to church every Sunday or indulged in wicked pastimes like playing cards) had a troubled history and only got officially sanctioned, printed and distributed in 1690. There is an entire book about its history, by Hugo Fröhlich, see below.
He married Clara Horstmann at the Kyrburg (near Kirn) on 25.9.1578 then Katharina Engelhardt, born 1554 at Gießen.
The latter is believed to be the mother of his nine children VI-34 through to VI-42.
His daughter Anna Maria is one of three Orth women who got to marry the vicar and superintendent Johann Valentin Corvinus (see under VI-59). The other two were her cousin Amalia, widow of Nikolaus Andreae, and Amalia's sister Dorothea.
He stayed in office rather longer than his father, until his death in 1602.
Printed sources:
- Hauth, Ulrich: Nahe bei Gott und den Menschen: Geschichte der Evangelischen Kirchengemeinde Kirn an der Nahe.
- Fröhlich, Hugo, Die Geschichte der Kirchenordnung in der Wild- und Rheingrafschaft bis 1690.
There is another cross-link with the Orth descendants further down the line: Marianne Weiß, daughter of the vicar of Eckweiler, married Philipp Orth from Weiler near Martinstein, on the river Nahe. He is number IX-59 in the Orth genealogy (he descends from Jakob junior). They have six children and 17 grandchildren according to that page.
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