Sussana Ulrich

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sussana Ulrich (1727–1812), a 7× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her German birth, early loss of her mother, immigration-era context, marriage to Hans Johannes Nicholas Martin, her daughter Susannah, and her death in Frederick County, Maryland. Notable: born in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg; part of the 18th-century German migration to colonial Maryland.

Sussana Ulrich (1727–1812) was born on the first day of April 1727 in Mannheim, in the region of Baden-Württemberg, in what is today southwestern Germany. She entered the world during a period of considerable upheaval along the Rhine, where decades of warfare, religious tension, and economic strain had unsettled the Palatinate and surrounding territories. From these very lands, throughout the early and middle eighteenth century, great numbers of German-speaking families undertook the arduous passage to the British colonies in North America, settling most heavily in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Her mother, Elisabetha Wagoner, born in 1696, died in 1728, scarcely more than a year after Sussana's birth. The loss of her mother in earliest infancy would have shaped the circumstances of her upbringing, though the particulars of her childhood are not preserved in the family record.

In due course Sussana was joined in marriage to Hans Johannes Nicholas Martin. Of this union there is recorded a daughter, Susannah Martin, born in 1755, who bore her mother's name but whose own life was brief, ending in 1780. Whether other children were born to the couple is not stated in the surviving record.

The family's removal to the American colonies is evidenced by Sussana's death, which occurred on the first day of January 1812 in Frederick, Frederick County, Maryland. Frederick County in that era was a flourishing center of German-American settlement, home to Lutheran, Reformed, and various pietist communities whose churches, farmsteads, and trades gave the region its distinctive character well into the nineteenth century. Sussana lived to the venerable age of eighty-four, having witnessed both the colonial era of her adopted country and the founding of the young American republic.

Sussana Ulrich was a seventh great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.