CHRISTINE Angelica Hotzel

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Christine Angelica Hotzel (1699–1769), an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Alsace, marriage to Johann Barthel Kuntz Sr., issue including Johann Philip Kuntz, her death in the Saarland, and era context. Notable: an Alsatian-German ancestor whose descendants would later cross into the Palatine-German migration stream.

Christine Angelica Hotzel (1699–1769) stands among the early continental forebears of the Hyten line, an 8× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) branch. She was born on the 5th of December, 1699, in the village of Walbach, in the Haut-Rhin district of Alsace, then within the Kingdom of France though deeply German in tongue and custom. Alsace at the close of the seventeenth century was a contested borderland, recently brought under French sovereignty by the treaties of Westphalia and Nijmegen, yet its peasantry, artisans, and parish life remained predominantly Germanic in language, confession, and surname — a duality reflected in Christine's own French residence and German given names.

She came of age during the long reign of Louis XIV and the unsettled decades that followed his death in 1715, an era marked across the Rhineland by the slow recovery of villages depopulated and burnt during the wars of the previous century. It was in this world of rebuilding parishes and resettled farmsteads that Christine entered into marriage with Johann Barthel Kuntz Sr., binding the Hotzel name to the Kuntz family from which the compiler's later paternal line would descend.

Of the children born of that union, the record here preserves Johann Philip Kuntz (1726–1829), whose remarkable longevity would carry the family's memory deep into the nineteenth century and across the Atlantic in the persons of his descendants. Through Johann Philip, the blood of the Hotzels of Walbach passes directly into the American branches of the family.

Christine died on the 24th of November, 1769, in Bischmisheim, near Saarbrücken, in what is now the German Saarland — a migration of some distance northeastward from her Alsatian birthplace, and a reminder of how readily families of the Rhine valley moved between French and German territories in that age. She was nearly seventy years old at her death.

Christine was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.