Hans Bettler

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Hans Bettler (1566–1617), an 11× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Boltigen, Bern, Switzerland, his parentage, marriage to Elsi Abbühl, and son Hans Moser Betler. Notable: deep Swiss Bernese origins in the Bettler line predating the family's later Anabaptist and emigrant chapters.

Hans Bettler was born in the year 1566 in the Alpine village of Boltigen, in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, and departed this life in 1617 in the same country of his nativity. He was the son of Peter Bettler and his wife, recorded in the family register as Mrs. Peter Moeschberger Bettler, a name which preserves both her marital identity and her connection to the Moeschberger line of the Bernese highlands.

The Boltigen of Hans's birth lay in the Simmental valley, a pastoral region of the Bernese Oberland whose inhabitants in the late sixteenth century lived chiefly by the keeping of cattle and the labors of the mountain farmstead. It was an era of considerable religious ferment in the Swiss cantons, the Reformation having taken firm root in Bern several decades earlier, and the surrounding valleys would in the following century become known for the dissenting Anabaptist communities from which many later Swiss-German emigrant families traced their spiritual lineage.

Hans Bettler took to wife Elsi Abbühl, a union that joined two families long settled in the Bernese countryside. Of their issue, the family record preserves the name of their son, Hans Moser Betler, who lived until 1644 and through whom the Bettler line was carried forward into succeeding generations.

Hans died in 1617, at approximately fifty-one years of age, in the land of his birth. He never knew the great emigrations that would, generations after him, carry his descendants across the Atlantic toward the New World; his life was wholly bounded by the mountains and meadows of Bern. Yet through the careful transmission of name and parentage in the family register, his memory has been preserved across more than four centuries.

Hans Bettler was an eleven-times great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.