Maria Catharine Schneider

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Maria Catharine Schneider (1757–1833), a 6× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Lancaster County Pennsylvania birth, her German-Palatine family origins, her marriage to John George Küntz, her daughter Mary Catharina Kuntz, and her death in Somerset County. Notable: Pennsylvania German colonial heritage spanning the Revolutionary era.

Maria Catharine Schneider (1757–1833) was born on the seventh of March, 1757, in Hempfield Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, into the Pennsylvania German communities that had taken deep root in that fertile inland country during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. She was the daughter of Anna Maria Schweinforth (1724–1768), whose surname, like that of Schneider, belonged to the broad current of German-speaking immigration that flowed through the port of Philadelphia and outward into the farmsteads of Lancaster and the neighboring counties.

Lancaster County in the years of Maria Catharine's childhood was a prosperous and tightly woven landscape of Lutheran, Reformed, Mennonite, and Amish households, marked by stone farmhouses, bank barns, and an enduring use of the German tongue in worship and in daily affairs. Into such a setting the young Maria Catharine came of age, losing her mother in 1768 when she was but eleven years old, on the eve of the imperial troubles that would soon convulse the American colonies.

She was united in marriage to John George Küntz, a union which brought forth at least one daughter known to the present record, Mary Catharina Kuntz, born in 1772 and living until 1812. The variant spellings — Küntz, Kuntz — and the gradual Anglicization of the family name reflect the steady linguistic accommodation that the Pennsylvania Germans made across the generations of the early Republic.

In the later years of her life Maria Catharine was found in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, in the highland country west of the Allegheny ridges, where many Lancaster families had pressed onward in search of fresh land during the post-Revolutionary decades. There she died on the twenty-ninth of November, 1833, in her seventy-seventh year.

Maria Catharine Schneider was a sixfold great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather line.