Peter Bettler

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Peter Bettler (b. 1536, d. unknown), a 12× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Boltigen, Bern, his death in Bolligen, his marriage, and his son Hans. Notable: 16th-century Swiss origin in the Bernese Oberland, the cradle region of the family's Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage.

Peter Bettler was born in the year 1536 in Boltigen, a village set among the green valleys of the Bernese Oberland in what is now the canton of Bern, Switzerland. He passed from this life in Bolligen, Bern, the precise year of his death not preserved in the family record. He stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a twelvefold great-grandfather, one of the earliest Swiss progenitors thus far recovered for that branch of the family.

The Bern of Peter Bettler's lifetime was a place of considerable ferment. The Protestant Reformation had taken hold in the canton in 1528, scarcely eight years before his birth, and the Bernese countryside in the middle decades of the sixteenth century remained a landscape in which questions of faith, civic loyalty, and conscience were vigorously contested. It was in precisely this region, and during precisely these generations, that the Anabaptist movement took root among the rural families of the Emme and Aare valleys — the spiritual lineage from which the later Mennonite emigrants to the Palatinate and ultimately to Pennsylvania and the American interior would descend. The Bettler name belongs to this Swiss matrix, and the family's later confessional identity is best understood against that backdrop.

Peter Bettler married a daughter of the Moeschberger family, whose given name has not survived in the record and who is preserved only as Mrs. Peter Moeschberger Bettler. From this union came at least one son known to the archive, Hans Bettler, who lived into the early seventeenth century and died in 1617. Through Hans the line continued forward across the generations and ultimately found its way, in the fullness of time, into the American chapters of the family's story.

Peter was the compiler's twelfth great-grandfather on the paternal-paternal-grandfather line.