Verge watch : Adam Schardt, Nassau forces at Waterloo

Open faced verge watch with silver case. The dial is made of white enamel with black arabic numerals and blued steel hands. Inside the back cover is a maker's hallmark. The inside of the glass cover has a roughly etched repair date. The watch is complete with a winding key.

This watch was owned Adam Schardt, who was born at Frickhofen in the German Duchy of Nassau on 12 December 1796. Young men in Nassau were required to give two years military service from the age of twenty. At the end of 1816, when Adam would normally have enlisted, he was noted as being absent from the Duchy 'since 1815' as a batman or officer's servant in Holland. He is said to have carried his watch at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. As batman he would have been a non-combatant but he may have been inadvertently caught up in the four day battle. After the battle he may have accompanied his officer to Paris as part of the Army of Occupation. When he returned to the Duchy in 1817, Schardt not only completed his delayed two years of compulsory military duty, but stayed on in the army for a further six years. He was discharged at the beginning of 1823.

Schardt married after the Napoleonic Wars, when he described himself as a messenger (servant). He later moved to Frankfurt.

Father to a large family, many of his children emigrated to America and then Australia, following the Gold Rushes. Three of his sons worked the Lambing Flat gold fields in New South Wales before becoming landholders at Captain's Flat, near Canberra. All of his sons had left Nassau before 1866 to avoid Bismark's draft when the Duchy was annexed by Prussia. Adam Schardt himself had first come to Australia by himself in 1855. In the early 1860s he returned to Germany to collect his youngest daughter, Susanna. She accompanied him back to Australia where they joined Adam's sons at Captain's Flat. Schardt died there in 1874.

Susanna married August Adolf Siebert in 1868. One of her sons, Trooper George Siebert of Queanbeyan, NSW, served with 5 Australian Commonwealth Horse during the Boer War.