Anna Loysa Regina

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anna Loysa Regina (1658–1727), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Swiss birth in Zollikofen, Bern; her parentage; her marriage to Johann Michael Mueller; her daughter Regina Elisabetha; and her death in colonial New Jersey, with era context on Swiss-German Anabaptist emigration to the American colonies.

Anna Loysa Regina (1658–1727) was born in Zollikofen, a village in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, to Hans Conrad Mueller (1618–1683) and Anna Barbara Mueller (1621–1693). Her birthplace situates her among the Swiss-German communities of the Bernese Mittelland, a region marked in the seventeenth century by religious tension between the Reformed state church and the Anabaptist and Mennonite minorities. Many families bearing the Mueller surname were caught up in successive waves of emigration that carried Swiss and Palatine households down the Rhine and, eventually, across the Atlantic to Pennsylvania and the Jerseys, a pattern that bears upon Anna Loysa Regina's own remarkable journey from Bern to the American seaboard.

She married Johann Michael Mueller, who stands in the family record as a tenth great-grandfather of the compiler. From their union came a daughter, Regina Elisabetha Mueller — later rendered Miller in the Anglicized colonial manner — born in 1675 and herself living until 1727, the very year of her mother's death. The shared year of passing between mother and daughter is a poignant note in the family chronology, though the archive does not record the circumstances.

Anna Loysa Regina's death is recorded in 1727 in Atlantic County, on the ocean shore of colonial New Jersey. That her life began in an Alpine village and ended within sight of the Atlantic surf testifies to the broader transatlantic movement of German-speaking families during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when New Jersey and neighboring Pennsylvania were actively receiving Swiss and Palatine settlers. Whether she crossed in mid-life or in her later years is not recorded here, but the geography of her birth and burial bears silent witness to that migration.

Anna Loysa Regina was the compiler's ninth great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.