Johannas Hans David Martin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Johannas Hans David Martin (1646–1726), a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in the Rhineland Palatinate, his marriage to Christina Henel, his recorded son Johann Georg Pancratius Martin, and his death at Obernheim. Notable: deep Palatine German roots in a region central to later Mennonite and Anabaptist migrations to America.

Johannas Hans David Martin, born in 1646 at Zeselberg in the Rhineland-Pfalz of what is now Germany, stands among the earliest documented forebears of the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, occupying the position of a 9× great-grandfather. His long life of some eighty years was lived entirely within the southwestern reaches of the Palatinate, a region whose rolling hills, vineyards, and small farming villages had for generations sustained a hardy, predominantly Protestant peasantry.

The years of his birth and early manhood fell in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years' War, which had concluded in 1648 and left the Palatinate among the most devastated lands in central Europe. Whole villages had been depopulated, fields lay fallow, and the surviving inhabitants set themselves to the slow labor of rebuilding home, parish, and field. It was within this recovering countryside that Johannas came of age, married, and raised his family. The Palatinate of his later years would suffer further upheavals during the wars of Louis XIV, and would in time become one of the great seedbeds of German emigration to Pennsylvania and the American colonies — though Johannas himself remained rooted in the soil of his birth.

He took as his wife Christina Henel, and to their union was born a son, Johann Georg Pancratius Martin (1692–1756), through whom the Martin line descends to the compiler. The triple given name borne by both father and son reflected the Palatine custom of bestowing saints' and patronymic names in combination, a practice common among the Lutheran and Reformed households of the region.

Johannas died on the 14th of August, 1726, at Obernheim in the Sudwestpfalz, and was laid to rest in the country of his birth. He was a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.