ANNA Marie Hahn

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anna Marie Hahn (1695–1762), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in the Rheinish Palatinate, parentage, marriage to Johann Georg Pancratius Martin, her son Johannes, and her death at Steinfeld. Notable: rooted in early-18th-century Palatinate Germany during the era of mass emigration to colonial America.

Anna Marie Hahn (1695–1762) entered the world on the thirtieth of January, 1695, in the village of Gerhardsbrunn in the district of Kaiserslautern, within the Rheinland-Pfalz region of what is today southwestern Germany. She was the daughter of Johan Philips Hahn (1652–1705) and Anna Elisabetha Thiel (1664–1735), and her early life unfolded in a Palatinate still recovering from the devastations of the late seventeenth century. The region, repeatedly traversed by the armies of the Nine Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession, had suffered the burning of villages, the displacement of farming families, and successive waves of famine; it was in this hard-tried landscape of vineyards, small holdings, and Reformed and Lutheran parishes that Anna Marie was raised.

She lost her father when she was but ten years of age, in 1705, and was reared thereafter under the continuing presence of her mother, who would survive until 1735. In due time Anna Marie was united in marriage to Johann Georg Pancratius Martin, joining her line to the Martin family of the same Rhenish country. Of their union is recorded a son, Hans Johannes Nicholas Martin, born in 1721 and living until 1795, through whom her descent passed forward into succeeding generations of the family.

It was during Anna Marie's adult years that the great Palatine emigrations to Pennsylvania and the British colonies of North America gathered force, as kinsmen and neighbors from the villages of Kaiserslautern and the surrounding Pfalz set out down the Rhine in search of land and religious peace. Anna Marie herself, however, remained upon her native soil. She died on the ninth of April, 1762, at Steinfeld, Germany, having lived sixty-seven years.

Anna Marie Hahn stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as an eighth great-grandmother, one of the German foremothers from whom the later American branches of the family ultimately descend.