Ahnentafel № 17 · The compiler's 2× great-grandparent
Mary Alice Stutsman
1858–1931 · of Indiana, USA
Birth
24 Mar 1858
Indiana, USA
Death
7 Oct 1931
Brownsburg, Hendricks, Indiana, USA
Biography
From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Alice Stutsman (1858–1931), a 2× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Indiana birth, Stutsman-Foster parentage, marriage to Oscar O Hyten, motherhood of Henry Hyten, and her death in Hendricks County. Notable: Stutsman surname suggests Swiss-German Mennonite or Anabaptist heritage common to the Indiana frontier.
Mary Alice Stutsman (1858–1931) was born on the 24th of March, 1858, in the state of Indiana, the daughter of Jerimiah Nicholas Stutsman (1830–1901) and his wife Isabella A. Foster (1839–1918). She entered the world on the eve of the great national rupture, her infancy unfolding against the gathering storm of civil war, and her girlhood passing in the Indiana of Reconstruction — a country of small farms, market towns, and the steady westward consolidation of the Midwest's agricultural communities.
The Stutsman name carried with it the heritage of Swiss-German Anabaptist and Mennonite families who had crossed into Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century and pressed westward through Ohio into Indiana by the early nineteenth, settling among the plain-living agricultural communities of the interior. Through her mother, Isabella Foster, she inherited a parallel strand of Anglo-American settlement, the Fosters being a name long established in the Indiana countryside of that generation.
In the course of her life Mary Alice was united in marriage to Oscar O. Hyten, joining the Stutsman line to the Hyten family whose name would descend through the compiler's own paternal-grandfather lineage. Of this union there is record of a son, Henry Hyten, born in 1901, who would in time continue the family line. Mary Alice was already in her forties at Henry's birth, a circumstance not uncommon in an era when families were often large and childbearing extended across many years of married life.
She lived out her later years in central Indiana, and on the 7th of October, 1931, she died at Brownsburg, in Hendricks County, Indiana — a town that had grown from a modest crossroads settlement into a settled community of farms and trades over the course of her lifetime. She had reached the age of seventy-three.
Mary Alice Stutsman was the compiler's great-great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.
Additional research
Subsequent inquiry into the public records of Hendricks County, Indiana, has yielded a foundational date long absent from the family's recollection: Mary Alice Stutsman was united in marriage to Oscar O. Hyten on the 1st of September, 1894, the union being recorded in Hendricks County Marriage Book 11, Page 280, where her husband's surname was rendered phonetically as "Hyton" — a variant common in clerks' hands of the period (per the USGenWeb Archives transcription of the Hendricks County WPA marriage index). She was thirty-six years of age at the time, and her son Henry would follow some seven years later, placing his birth firmly within the established marriage.
The same county index has provided welcome corroboration of the parental generation, recording the marriage of "Nickolas Stutsman" to "Isabelle Foster" on the 22nd of October, 1856, in Hendricks County (Book 5, Page 111) — confirming that her parents, Jeremiah Nicholas Stutsman and Isabella A. Foster, had themselves wed in the very county where their daughter would one day end her days.
The depth of the Stutsman family's roots in that ground is further attested by the Nichols–Stutsman family cemetery, catalogued by the Indiana State Library as lying in Section 7 of Center Township, Hendricks County — a small private burying ground that bespeaks the family's established standing in the area well before Mary Alice's own time (per the Indiana State Library catalogue).
For her own burial, the most likely resting place remains Brownsburg Cemetery, situated at 190 East 56th Street in Brownsburg, on the northeast corner of 56th Street and State Route 267 (per Find A Grave), though no individual memorial has yet been confirmed. Official death and marriage records survive at the Hendricks County Health Department and County Clerk's office respectively, and the Brownsburg Public Library maintains an index of local obituaries that may yet yield a 1931 death notice (per the FamilySearch wiki and the Hendricks County Genealogical Society).
Mary Alice Stutsman remains the compiler Jacob Hyten's great-great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.
Family
Parents
Children
Sources
Source citations and original documents will appear here as research progresses. Currently sourced from Ancestry tree hints — to be verified.