Elsa Unknown Jung Hauser

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elsa (maiden surname unknown) Jung Hauser (1630–1672), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Bavarian origins, marriage to Heinrich Hauser, motherhood, and the era context of seventeenth-century Germany. Notable: her life unfolded in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years' War in the Bavarian lands of the Holy Roman Empire.

Elsa Hauser, whose maiden surname has been lost to the family record and is preserved only under the placeholder Jung, was born in 1630 in Nassau, in the district of Deggendorf, Bayern, in what is today southeastern Germany. Her birth fell in the very midst of the Thirty Years' War, that long and ruinous conflict which from 1618 to 1648 devastated the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, depopulating entire villages of Bavaria through famine, plague, and the passage of foreign armies. To be born into a Bavarian peasant or burgher household in 1630 was to enter a world of profound disruption, and the recovery of the southern German territories would occupy the better part of her lifetime.

She was united in marriage to Heinrich Hauser, and through that union she took the surname under which she has descended in the family record. Of her parentage, her maiden name, and the particulars of her household no documentary trace has survived to the compiler, a circumstance not unusual for women of her generation and station, whose lives were seldom recorded apart from the parish registers of baptism, marriage, and burial maintained by the local church.

Of her children, the family record preserves the name of Anna Margaretha Hauser, born in 1660 and living until 1739 — a daughter who reached the considerable age of seventy-nine years and through whom the line of descent passed forward into succeeding generations of the family. Anna Margaretha's long life stands in poignant contrast to that of her mother, for Elsa herself died in 1672, in Germany, at the age of about forty-two, leaving her daughter then a young woman of twelve.

Elsa was the compiler's 10× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, and she stands among the earliest German forebears whose name the family register has succeeded in retaining.