NICHOLAS Stutsman

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Nicholas Stutsman (1773–1851), a fifth great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Pennsylvania, parentage, marriage to Mary Catharina Kuntz, son David, westward migration to Illinois, and era context. Notable: Stutsman lineage of Swiss-German Mennonite/Anabaptist heritage, and frontier resettlement from Pennsylvania to the Illinois prairie.

Nicholas Stutsman (1773–1851) entered the world on the second of October, 1773, in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, then a rugged stretch of the western Pennsylvania frontier scarcely two years from the Revolutionary upheaval that would soon engulf the colonies. He was the son of David Martin Stutzman (1742–1822) and Susannah Martin (1755–1780); his mother's death in 1780, when Nicholas was but seven years of age, left a mark common to many frontier childhoods of that period.

The Stutsman name carried with it a deep Swiss-German Anabaptist and Mennonite inheritance, the family being part of the wider migration of plain-faith communities who had sought refuge in Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century. Somerset County in those years was a stronghold of such German-speaking settlers, who cultivated its hills, raised large families, and preserved the language and devotional habits of their forebears. It was within this cultural milieu that Nicholas came of age.

In time he was united in marriage to Mary Catharina Kuntz, whose surname likewise bespoke the German-Pennsylvania community from which both households sprang. Of their union is recorded a son, David Stutsman (1799–1886), whose long life would carry the family line forward into the nineteenth century.

Like many of his generation, Nicholas did not remain in the place of his birth. The opening of the trans-Appalachian West in the early decades of the 1800s drew Pennsylvania families westward by stages, often through Ohio and Indiana, into the newer states beyond. Nicholas's own pilgrimage led at length to Salisbury, in Coles County, Illinois, a prairie settlement of the central part of that young state. There he died on the 23rd of September, 1851, in his seventy-eighth year.

Nicholas was the compiler's fifth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.