Johann Bernhard Ferdinand Jühlke, the third of his parents' three recorded sons together, was born on 1 September 1815 and baptised 16 days later, at Barth (Pomerania), in the extreme north of what would become Germany. Johann Martin Jühlke, his father, was a carpenter-joiner. The year of his birth was the year in which the entire province of Swedish Pomerania ceased to be Swedish and became part of Prussia, as part of the process whereby the nation-brokers at the Congress of Vienna confirmed the nation's recovery of "great power" status and the reversal of its near annihilation by the French Empire in 1806. Jühlke's parents divorced soon after he was born and his father remarried, following which the boys acquired a half-sister in 1818.