Anna Maria Clara Klager

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Anna Maria Clara Klager (1636–1694), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Saarbrucken, marriage to Johann Nickel Kuntz, her son Johann Georg Kuntz, her death in Bischmisheim, and context for the Saarland region of the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth century.

Anna Maria Clara Klager (1636–1694) was born in Saarbrucken, in the Saarland region of what is today western Germany, and she lived out the whole of her fifty-eight years within that same small corner of the Holy Roman Empire. She stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as a 10× great-grandmother, an early German matriarch whose name is preserved in the family register among the deepest layers of European ancestry yet documented.

Anna Maria's lifetime spanned a particularly trying century for the Saar country. She was born in 1636, in the latter years of the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that ravaged the German lands and depopulated entire districts of the Rhineland and Saarland through famine, plague, and the passage of contending armies. The peace of 1648 came when she was a girl of twelve, and the rebuilding of villages, parishes, and farmsteads in the Saarbrucken district occupied the labors of her generation. Later in her life the region would again be unsettled by the wars of Louis XIV, whose forces repeatedly crossed and claimed portions of the Saarland.

She was joined in marriage to Johann Nickel Kuntz, and from their union the family record preserves a son, Johann Georg Kuntz, born in 1676 and destined to live an unusually long life of eighty-seven years, surviving until 1763. Through this son the Kuntz line carried forward into succeeding generations and ultimately into the American branches of the family.

Anna Maria Clara Klager died on the 27th of February, 1694, at Bischmisheim, a village near Saarbrucken, and there her earthly course concluded. She was the compiler's 10× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.