Hans Jacob Stutzmann

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Hans Jacob Stutzmann (1625–1696), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) Stutsman line. This entry covers his birth and death in Erlenbach on Lake Zurich, his parentage, marriage to Madelena Mary Betler, and son Johann Jakob. Notable: deep Swiss origin of the Stutsman surname, predating the family's Anabaptist–Mennonite migration to America.

Hans Jacob Stutzmann (1625–1696) was born on the first of February, 1625, in Erlenbach, a lakeside village on the eastern shore of the Zürichsee in the canton of Zürich, Switzerland. He was the son of Hans Jacob Stutzman, who died in 1642 while the younger Hans Jacob was still a youth of seventeen, and of Elsbeth zu der Mule, who had departed this life still earlier, in 1627, when her son was scarcely two years old. The loss of his mother in infancy and his father in adolescence shaped the early circumstances of his life within the close-knit village communities that characterized the Zürich countryside of the seventeenth century.

The Zürich into which Hans Jacob was born was a Reformed Protestant city-state of considerable orderliness and prosperity, though the broader German-speaking lands were torn by the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) during the whole of his childhood. The lakeside parishes of Erlenbach and its neighbors were also, in this era, places where Anabaptist convictions quietly persisted despite official suppression — a current of dissent that would eventually carry many Swiss families, including bearers of the Stutzmann name, into the Palatinate, Alsace, and ultimately Pennsylvania and the American Midwest, where the surname would settle into its later form of Stutsman.

Hans Jacob took to wife Madelena Mary Betler, and from this union came at least one recorded son, Johann Jakob Stutzman, born in 1675. Johann Jakob's remarkable recorded lifespan of a full century carried the line forward into the eighteenth century and beyond.

Hans Jacob Stutzmann lived out his full life in his native Erlenbach, dying there on the eleventh of November, 1696, in his seventy-second year, in the very parish of his birth. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a 9× great-grandfather, one of the earliest documented forebears of the Stutsman branch of the family.