Johann Mathias Kuntz

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Johann Mathias Kuntz (1700–1771), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Bischmisheim, Saarland, his parentage, marriage, daughter, and the early 18th-century Saarland context of his life. Notable: lifelong residence in a single German village across seven decades of regional turbulence.

Johann Mathias Kuntz, born on the fifth day of February 1700 in the village of Bischmisheim near Saarbrücken in the Saarland region of present-day Germany, lived out the whole of his seventy-one years within the bounds of that same parish, dying there on the twenty-fifth of February 1771. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as an eighth great-grandparent, and his life forms one of the deeper German anchors of that branch of the family tree.

He was the son of Johann Jacob Kuntz (1668–1701) and Anna Eva Wolff (1676–1742). The loss of his father in 1701, when Johann Mathias was scarcely a year old, would have left him to be raised under the long widowhood of his mother, who survived her husband by more than four decades and lived until 1742, into her son's own middle age.

The Saarland of Johann Mathias's century lay along the contested frontier between the German territories and France, repeatedly traversed by armies and shifting allegiances in the wake of the wars of Louis XIV. Bischmisheim itself was a small village within the territory of Saarbrücken, agricultural and Protestant in character, where parish registers preserved the rhythms of baptism, marriage, and burial that bind such genealogies together. It was within this setting that Johann Mathias passed his entire life.

He married Margaretha Elisabeth Gail Reger, and from their union is recorded a daughter, Catharina Elisabetha, born in 1723. Catharina later took the surname Schwinger by marriage and lived until 1754, predeceasing her father by some seventeen years — a sorrow not uncommon to long-lived parents of that age, who often outlived one or more of their children.

Johann Mathias Kuntz was the compiler's eighth great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal line, and through his daughter Catharina the Kuntz blood passed forward into the generations that would in time cross to America.