Hans JOHANNES Nicholas Martin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Hans Johannes Nicholas Martin (1721–1795), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in the German Palatinate, parentage, emigration to colonial Pennsylvania, marriage, daughter Susannah, and death in the Conococheague Settlement. Notable: Palatine German immigrant ancestor whose life bridged the Rhineland and the colonial American frontier.

Hans Johannes Nicholas Martin, born on the 3rd of April in 1721 at Hermersberg in the Südwestpfalz of the Rheinland-Pfalz, entered the world in a Palatine German village shaped by generations of agrarian custom and by the long shadow of the religious wars of the previous century. He was the son of Johann Georg Pancratius Martin (1692–1756) and Anna Marie Hahn (1695–1762), and was christened in the Lutheran tradition common to that region.

The early eighteenth century in the Palatinate was a period of considerable hardship and emigration. Crop failures, heavy taxation, and the recurring devastations of war drove tens of thousands of Palatine Germans toward the British colonies in North America, where Pennsylvania in particular welcomed them under the tolerant policies first set forth by William Penn. It was within this broader Palatine migration that Hans Johannes eventually crossed the Atlantic, settling at length in the Conococheague Settlement of south-central Pennsylvania — a frontier district along the Maryland border peopled largely by German and Scots-Irish families during the middle decades of the eighteenth century.

He married Sussana Ulrich, and from their union came a daughter, Susannah Martin, born in 1755. The younger Susannah's life was brief, ending in 1780, and she preceded her father to the grave by some fifteen years.

Hans Johannes lived through the formative decades of the American colonies, the upheavals of the French and Indian War on the very frontier where he had made his home, and the long course of the American Revolution. He died on the 1st of January in 1795 in the Conococheague Settlement, where he had passed the greater part of his American life.

Hans Johannes Nicholas Martin was a seven-times great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather line.