Susanne Margaretha Anna Simon

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Susanne Margaretha Anna Simon (1680–1756), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Saarbrücken, her marriage to Johann Georg Kuntz, her daughter Margaretha Elisabeth, her death in Bischmisheim, and the regional context of late-17th and early-18th century Saarland under the shadow of the French wars.

Susanne Margaretha Anna Simon was born on the 19th of December, 1680, in Saarbrücken, in the Saarland region of what is today southwestern Germany. She passed from this life on the 1st of October, 1756, in the nearby village of Bischmisheim, having lived nearly seventy-six years within a small radius of the Saar valley — a remarkable span for a woman of her era and place.

The Saarland into which Susanne was born occupied a contested borderland between the German Rhenish territories and the expanding ambitions of Louis XIV's France. During her childhood, the region suffered through the Nine Years' War, and the Saarbrücken of her infancy bore the marks of French occupation and reconstruction. The Lutheran and Reformed communities of the Saar were small, closely-knit, and shaped equally by piety and by hardship. It was within this world that Susanne came of age.

She was joined in marriage to Johann Georg Kuntz, and from this union came at least one daughter known to the family record: Margaretha Elisabeth, born in 1699, who would later carry the surnames Gail and Reger through her own marriages and who lived until 1763. Through this daughter, Susanne's line would extend forward across generations and, in time, across the Atlantic.

Susanne lived to see her grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow into adulthood — a quiet but considerable inheritance for a woman whose name might otherwise have been lost to time. The Saarbrücken parish registers and the surrounding village records of the period are the slender thread by which her existence is preserved to her descendants.

Susanne Margaretha Anna Simon stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a 9× great-grandmother, an early matriarch of the German-rooted branches that would, in later generations, find their way into the broader Hyten family story.