JOHANN Georg Pancratius Martin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Johann Georg Pancratius Martin (1692–1756), an 8× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Zeiselberg, his parents David Martin and Christina Henel, his marriage to Anna Marie Hahn, his son Johannes Nicholas, and his death at Edingen-Neckarhausen. Notable: an early 18th-century German Palatinate ancestor predating the family's later transatlantic migration.

Johann Georg Pancratius Martin (1692–1756) was born on the first day of January 1692 in the village of Zeiselberg, Germany, to Johannas Hans David Martin (1646–1726) and his wife, Christina Henel (born 1650). Bearing the three given names common to the German custom of his time — a saint's name, a patronymic gesture, and a name of personal devotion — Johann Georg Pancratius entered the world in a region of the Holy Roman Empire still bearing the scars of the Thirty Years' War and the more recent depredations of the Nine Years' War, conflicts which had repeatedly swept across the Palatinate and the Rhine valley during the lifetime of his parents. It was an age in which village life in southwestern Germany was rebuilding itself slowly, parish by parish, around the steady rhythms of the church register, the harvest, and the local lord.

In the course of his life Johann Georg married Anna Marie Hahn, and from this union came at least one son known to the family record: Hans Johannes Nicholas Martin, born in 1721 and surviving until 1795. Through this son the Martin line would continue forward, ultimately joining, generations later, the broader confluence of German and Anglo-American families gathered in the present compilation.

Johann Georg passed from this life on 27 November 1756 in Edingen-Neckarhausen, a community along the Neckar River not far from Heidelberg and Mannheim. He had attained the considerable age of sixty-four years, having seen the close of the long reign of Louis XIV in neighboring France, the rise of Prussia under Frederick William I and Frederick the Great, and the unsettled middle decades of the eighteenth century that would soon impel many of his German contemporaries to seek new homes across the Atlantic.

Johann Georg Pancratius Martin stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as an 8× great-grandfather.