David Martin Stutzman

From the Hyten family archive; subject is David Martin Stutzman (1742–1822), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Maryland birth, German-Swiss Mennonite parentage, marriage to Susannah Martin, son Nicholas, and removal to the Ohio frontier. Notable: probable Mennonite/Anabaptist heritage typical of the Stutzman line; early settler in Montgomery County, Ohio.

David Martin Stutzman (1742–1822) was born on the fourteenth of June, 1742, at Hagerstown in Frederick County, Maryland, the son of Johannes Jakob Stutzman (1705–1775). The Stutzman name, borne by Swiss-German Anabaptist families who fled persecution on the Continent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was already well established among the German-speaking settlers of the Maryland and Pennsylvania backcountry by the time of David's birth. Hagerstown itself was, in that era, a frontier crossroads where Mennonite, Brethren, and Lutheran families took up land along the wagon roads pressing westward from the older Pennsylvania settlements.

In the fullness of his years David was joined in marriage to Susannah Martin, a union from which issued at least one recorded son, Nicholas Stutsman (1773–1851), through whom the line descended to the compiler. The slight alteration of the family name from Stutzman to Stutsman, observable in the next generation, was a common shift among German surnames as they passed into the orthography of English-speaking clerks and neighbors on the American frontier.

At some point in the latter half of his life David removed westward into the Ohio country, that vast tract opened to settlement after the close of the Revolution and the subsequent treaties with the native nations. Montgomery County, lying in the fertile valley of the Great Miami, drew a considerable number of Pennsylvania-German and Maryland-German families in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and it was in Perry Township of that county that David ended his days.

He died on the fourteenth of June, 1822 — by the curious symmetry of the records, upon the eightieth anniversary of his birth — and was gathered to his fathers in the Ohio soil he had come to in his later years.

David Martin Stutzman stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a sixth great-grandfather, a forebear of the Stutsman branch whose Mennonite-German inheritance entered the family in its earliest American generations.