ANNA Margaretha Hauser

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anna Margaretha Hauser (1660–1739), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth and death in the Saarland, her parentage, her marriage to Johan Kuntz, her son Johann Barthel Kuntz Sr., and the broader context of late 17th-century life in the German Rhineland-Palatinate borderlands.

Anna Margaretha Hauser (1660–1739) was born in the village of Bischmisheim, near Saarbrücken in the Saarland region of present-day Germany. She was the daughter of Heinrich Hauser (1633–1730), whose long life spanned nearly a century of turbulent regional history, and of Elsa Jung Hauser (1630–1672), who died when Anna Margaretha was still a young girl of about twelve. The loss of her mother in childhood was a not uncommon circumstance in that era, when childbirth and recurring epidemics weighed heavily upon women of the Saarland villages.

The Saarland of the later seventeenth century was a contested borderland, repeatedly traversed by the armies of France and the Holy Roman Empire during the wars of Louis XIV. Bischmisheim and its neighboring hamlets, clustered along the Saar valley, were Protestant communities of modest farmers and tradesfolk whose church registers preserved the careful record of baptism, marriage, and burial upon which much of our knowledge of this generation depends. It was within this world of village piety, agricultural rhythm, and political uncertainty that Anna Margaretha came of age.

She was joined in marriage to Johan Kuntz, and of this union issued at least one son known to the family record: Johann Barthel Kuntz Sr. (1680–1727), through whom the line was carried forward into the next generation. Her son's life, sadly, would prove shorter than her own; Anna Margaretha outlived him by more than a decade.

She died on the second of February, 1739, in the same Saarland village in which she had been born nearly seventy-nine years before. Hers was a life that began in the years following the Thirty Years' War's lingering aftermath and closed on the eve of an age of fresh upheaval in the German lands.

Anna Margaretha was the compiler's 9× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.