Johann Georg Kuntz

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Johann Georg Kuntz (1676–1763), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Bischmisheim in the Saarland, his parentage, marriage to Susanne Margaretha Anna Simon, and his daughter Margaretha Elisabeth. Notable: German Saarland origin; long life spanning the late 17th and 18th centuries.

Johann Georg Kuntz (1676–1763) was born on the 24th of August 1676 in Bischmisheim, a village within the lands of Saarbrücken in the present-day Saarland of Germany. He passed from this life in the same village on the 22nd of July 1763, having lived a remarkable span of nearly eighty-seven years — an unusual longevity for his age, when many of his neighbors were lost to disease, want, or the upheavals of war well before such an age.

He was the son of Johann Nickel Kuntz (1625–1693) and Anna Maria Clara Klager (1636–1694), and was thus rooted firmly in the soil of the Saar, a region whose people endured repeated hardships in the long aftermath of the Thirty Years' War. The Saarland of Johann Georg's boyhood was a borderland forever contested between French and German interests, its villages rebuilt and depopulated more than once during the campaigns of Louis XIV. That his family persisted in Bischmisheim across these generations speaks to the deep attachment of the Kuntz line to that particular parish.

Johann Georg was joined in marriage to Susanne Margaretha Anna Simon, and from this union came at least one recorded daughter, Margaretha Elisabeth, born in 1699. She would later be known by the surnames Gail and Reger through her own marriages, and curiously departed this life in 1763, the same year as her father. Whether father and daughter were carried off by a common cause or merely by the coincidences of advanced age and illness, the family record does not say.

Johann Georg lived his entire recorded life within the bounds of a single village, witnessing in his long years the close of one century and the dawn of another, as well as the slow rebuilding of his homeland.

Johann Georg was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.