SUSANNAH Martin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Susannah Martin (1755–1780), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Maryland birth, German-descended Martin parentage, brief marriage to David Martin Stutzman, motherhood, and early death. Notable: her union joined the Martin and Stutzman lines, the latter carrying Mennonite heritage, and produced son Nicholas Stutsman.

Susannah Martin (1755–1780) was born in Maryland in the year 1755, the daughter of Hans Johannes Nicholas Martin (1721–1795) and Sussana Ulrich (1727–1812). Her parents bore names common to the German-speaking settlers who, by the middle decades of the eighteenth century, had spread southward from the Pennsylvania colony into the fertile valleys of western Maryland. The region in which Susannah came of age was, in those years, a frontier of small farms, grist mills, and tightly knit congregations of Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist faith — a landscape shaped by Old World traditions transplanted into colonial soil.

In the course of her short life Susannah was united in marriage with David Martin Stutzman, whose surname carried the heritage of the Swiss-German Mennonite people. The Stutzman line had, by this period, become woven through the agricultural communities of Maryland and Pennsylvania, where plain habits of dress, speech, and worship endured among the descendants of the earlier Anabaptist migrations. The joining of the Martin and Stutzman households thus brought together two families rooted in the same broader Pennsylvania-German world.

Of this marriage was born at least one son of record, Nicholas Stutsman (1773–1851), through whom Susannah's blood and name would be carried into the nineteenth century and onward through the generations of the family here chronicled. The American Revolution unfolded during the years of her young motherhood, and the upheavals of that contest reached even the rural districts of Maryland, though the particular experience of Susannah's household in those years has not come down to us.

Susannah died in 1780 in Washington County, Maryland, at the age of approximately twenty-five years. Her life was brief, but the line that descended from her endured. She survives in this record as a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.