Anthony Anthouins Antoni Zwahlen Zwelen

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anthony Anthouins Antoni Zwahlen Zwelen (b. about 1554), an 11× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Zweisimmen, Bern, Switzerland, his marriage to Catharina Haehlen, and his daughter Madlena. Notable: 16th-century Swiss origins in the Bernese Oberland during the Reformation era.

Anthony Anthouins Antoni Zwahlen, also recorded under the surname variants Zwelen and Zwahlen, was born about the year 1554 in Zweisimmen, a village set in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland. The exact date of his death has not been preserved in the family record, though the survival of his approximate birth year alone is itself remarkable for a man of the mid-sixteenth century.

Zweisimmen in that age was a modest alpine community within the Canton of Bern, a region only a generation removed from the Protestant Reformation that had swept through Bern in 1528 under the leadership of reformers such as Berchtold Haller. By the time of Anthony's birth, the Bernese Oberland had become firmly Reformed in confession, and its mountain parishes kept careful baptismal and marriage registers — among the earliest such civil-ecclesiastical records in Europe — which is likely the reason a man of his station and era can still be identified by name today. The economy of the region rested upon pastoral husbandry, alpine dairying, and small-scale cultivation in the valleys.

Anthony married Catharina Haehlen, whose surname likewise appears in the registers under the spellings Zwahlen and Zwelen following her marriage, as was the Swiss custom. From this union descended at least one daughter preserved in the family line, Madlena Zwahlen, who lived into the next century and died in 1666. Through Madlena the Zwahlen blood was carried forward into succeeding generations, eventually crossing the Atlantic with the broader Swiss and Palatine emigrations that would in time contribute to the ancestry of the Hyten family in America.

Anthony stood at the deep Swiss root of the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line, where he was an eleventh great-grandfather of the compiler.