Peter Von Stutzman

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Peter Von Stutzman (c.1570–1623), an 11× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in the Palatinate or Swiss canton of Zurich, parentage, marriage to Barbara Liechti, and his sole recorded son Hans Jacob Stutzman. Notable: earliest documented Stutzman ancestor, situated in the cradle of the Swiss-German Anabaptist tradition.

Peter Von Stutzman, born about 1570 either in the Palatinate of Germany or in the village of Erlenbach in the Swiss canton of Zurich, stands at the deepest reach of the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line, a full eleven generations removed. He was the son of Johann Christen Stutzman, who died in 1600, and Elsbeth Aegelt, names that carry the family's earliest documented presence on the European continent. The variant spellings Stutzman, Stutsman, and Stutsmann would all later flow from this Swiss-German root.

Peter took as his wife Barbara Liechti, herself bearing a surname long established along the shores of the Zürichsee. From their union came at least one son of record, Hans Jacob Stutzman, who survived his father by nearly two decades and died in 1642.

Peter departed this life on the third day of September, 1623, at Erlenbach, on the eastern shore of Lake Zurich. The Switzerland of his lifetime was a land convulsed by the religious upheavals of the Reformation and its aftermath; the canton of Zurich had been the very seat of Huldrych Zwingli's reforming work a generation earlier, and by the late sixteenth century the region was a crucible of Anabaptist and Mennonite conviction, communities that would, over the following century and a half, suffer persecution sufficient to drive many of their number into the Palatinate, then to Pennsylvania, and ultimately into the American Midwest. Whether Peter himself held to the established Reformed church or to the dissenting Anabaptist movement, the surname Stutzman would in time become indelibly associated with the Mennonite migrations that brought his descendants to the New World.

His death in 1623 placed him among the generation that witnessed the opening years of the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that ravaged the German lands just beyond the Swiss frontier. Peter Von Stutzman was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal line.