Christine (Stini) Ellenberger

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Christine (Stini) Ellenberger (1545–after 1592), a 12× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in Biglen in the Canton of Bern, her mother Barbara Wyssen, her marriage to Jorg Liechti, and her daughter Barbara Liechti. Notable: deep Swiss Bernese roots in the Reformation-era Emmental region.

Christine Ellenberger, known familiarly as Stini, was born in 1545 in the village of Biglen, in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland. She lived out the whole of her recorded life within that same parish, where her death is noted as occurring sometime after 1592. Through her, the compiler's paternal-grandfather line reaches back twelve generations into the heart of the Emmental, the rolling hill country east of the city of Bern.

Her mother was Barbara Wyssen, known as Barbli, whose name appears in the registers of the same canton. The patronymic record of Stini's father has not been preserved in the family papers, but her maternal descent firmly places her among the established rural families of Bernese Switzerland.

Stini was joined in marriage to Jorg Liechti, a man of her own Bernese country. Of their union, the family records preserve the name of one daughter, Barbara Liechti, who lived until 1630 and who carried the line forward into the troubled seventeenth century.

The Bern of Stini's lifetime was a republic shaped profoundly by the Protestant Reformation, which the city had embraced in 1528, less than two decades before her birth. The Emmental villages such as Biglen lay under the spiritual and civil authority of the Bernese council, and the latter half of the sixteenth century saw both consolidation of the Reformed church and the first stirrings of the Anabaptist dissent for which the region would later become famous. Whether Stini's household leaned toward the established Reformed parish or toward the quieter dissenting currents that ran through the Emmental valleys, the surviving record does not disclose. What is certain is that her life was rooted in the soil, language, and faith of Bernese Switzerland, and that her descendants would in time carry that inheritance across the Atlantic.

Christine Ellenberger was the compiler's twelfth great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather line.