From Nancy High:
Fraje is at the heart of some confusion which gets untangled by the Andernacht records. She was the wife of Rabbi Israel (Strale) von Rheinbach, not his daughter, and this (along with another misinterpreted detail) is explained by the odd wording of the 1499 house list (Andernacht #3084). Household number 6 (rote Rose) reads: “Stral von Rheinbach, Hochmeister, Gumprechts Schwiegervater, Freye, seine Frau, und unversorgte Kinder”. Rabbi Israel and his family and associates had only just arrived, having fled from Nuernberg, so the person writing the entry wanted to clarify that he had some Frankfurt connections, and so he commented that he was Gumprecht’s father-in-law. Unfortunately, there were several eligible Gumprechts on that list (and that doesn’t even count the spurious Gumprecht “=um1507”). The only one whose name had already been mentioned (in household #3) was Gumprecht, son of Vifus Worms. He would have been the most likely Gumprecht to be married to a daughter of Strale/Israel, except that he died in 1500, leaving adult children, and definitely feels too old to be the right one. But we can’t entirely rule him out, nor another, more likely one: Gumprecht, son of Simon von Weisenau. He doesn’t appear on the list until household number 12, but we have to consider him all the same, and further hints arrive as we progress.
Back to the wording of the house list entry: Freye is “his” wife, but that refers to Stral, not to Gumprecht. And to further confuse things, Fraje had been married first to Salomon Worms who lived (and died, apparently, in 1497) in Nuernberg, and by Salomon Worms she had had a (definite) daughter, Gutlin, who married Rabbi Meir Worms, and a (probable) daughter who was married to Gumprecht (although since we know so little about that daughter except that her name was Roma if she was the wife of Gumprecht bn Simon Weisenau, we also can’t be sure whether she was Fraje’s by Salomon Worms or Strale von Rheinbach’s by an unknown first wife of his.).
The only other house list which shows Strale and Fraje is 1502 (#3271.5). He dies in April of 1505 and Fraje’s daughter and son-in-law, Meir Worms, move in with her by the time of the 1505 house list two months later (#3404.17). She is also living in that household in 1511 (#3733.2), 1512 (#3768.2), and 1514 (#3909.2).
So the Ele Toldot sheet for Fraje needs to be corrected to say Salomon Worms is her first husband, not her father, Seligman Zak is her father, not her maternal grandfather, and Rabbi Israel von Rheinbach is her second husband, not her stepfather. This sounds like a lot of changes, but all four of then are caused by a single, small slip, with the words “his wife” being read as referring to Gumprecht rather than to Israel.
I hope this helps clarify things.
Nancy
