MARY CATHARINA Kuntz

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Mary Catharina Kuntz (1772–1812), a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Pennsylvania German birth in Berks County, parentage in the Kuntz and Schneider families, marriage to Nicholas Stutsman, her son David, and her removal to frontier Ohio. Notable: leap-day birth, Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, early Ohio settlement, and Mennonite-associated Stutsman lineage.

Mary Catharina Kuntz, born on the twenty-ninth of February, 1772, at Tulpehocken in Berks County, Pennsylvania, entered the world on the rare leap-day, an auspicious mark upon a life otherwise of quiet domestic substance. She was the daughter of John George Küntz (1750–1829) and Maria Catharine Schneider (1757–1833), a household firmly rooted in the Pennsylvania German community that had taken hold along the Tulpehocken Creek in the eighteenth century. Berks County in that period was a stronghold of German-speaking settlers — Lutheran, Reformed, and various plain sects — whose farms, stone houses, and bilingual congregations gave the region its enduring character.

Mary Catharina married Nicholas Stutsman, joining her line to a family of Swiss-German extraction long associated with Mennonite traditions in colonial Pennsylvania. From this union came a son, David Stutsman (1799–1886), whose long life would carry the family memory deep into the latter nineteenth century.

At some point following her marriage, Mary Catharina removed with her family westward into Ohio, settling in Montgomery County. The years bracketing the turn of the nineteenth century saw a great westward current of Pennsylvania German families crossing the Alleghenies into the Miami Valley, drawn by fertile bottomlands and the promise of room for growing households. Montgomery County, organized in 1803 around the young town of Dayton, was at that time a frontier of recent clearings, blockhouses, and newly raised meetinghouses, where settlers carried with them the agricultural habits and dialect of eastern Pennsylvania.

It was in Montgomery County that Mary Catharina died in 1812, at the age of forty, her life cut short during the unsettled months of the war with Britain then unfolding along the western frontier. She was survived by her parents, both of whom would outlive her by more than two decades, and by her son David, through whose descendants her line continued.

Mary Catharina was the compiler's 5× great-grandmother on the paternal-paternal-grandfather line.