Madlena Zwahlen

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Madlena Zwahlen (1596–c.1666), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Swiss birth in Boltigen, her parentage in the Zwahlen and Haehlen families, her marriage to Hans Moser Betler, her daughter Madelena, and the 17th-century Bernese context. Notable: deep Swiss-Anabaptist regional heritage.

Madlena Zwahlen, born the 24th day of December in the year 1596 in the parish of Boltigen, in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, and departing this life about the year 1666, stands among the earliest Swiss forebears recorded in the Hyten family register. She was the daughter of Anthony Zwahlen (variously rendered Antoni Zwelen) and his wife Catharina Haehlen, both of the same mountainous Bernese country whose villages clung to the high valleys of the Simmental.

The Bern of Madlena's lifetime was a land marked by the long aftershocks of the Reformation. The seventeenth century in the Bernese Oberland brought to its country folk the trials of religious conformity under the established Reformed church, the strains of the Thirty Years' War raging beyond the cantonal borders, and the steady emergence of Anabaptist communities among the very hill parishes from which the Zwahlen and allied families sprang. It was from this Bernese stock that, in the generations to follow, many of the family's descendants would in time make their way across the Rhine into the Palatinate and ultimately to the New World.

Madlena was joined in marriage to Hans Moser Betler, and of that union the register preserves a daughter, Madelena Mary Betler, born in the year 1644 and surviving until 1727. Through this daughter the line continued forward, carrying the Bernese inheritance into succeeding generations of Mosers, Betlers, and their kin.

Madlena passed from this life in her native Switzerland about the year 1666, having lived some three score and ten years amid the villages and pastures of her birth. She was the compiler's tenth great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, and one of the most distant Swiss matriarchs whose name and dates the family has preserved in the archive.