Johann Jost Weber

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Johann Jost Weber (1720–1790), a 7× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Hesse, parentage, marriage to Anna Margaretha Mueller, his daughter Anna Elizabeth, and his transatlantic relocation to Waldoboro, Maine. Notable: German immigrant from Sinn, Hessen-Nassau to the Broad Bay (Waldoboro) German settlement in colonial Maine.

Johann Jost Weber (1720–1790) was born on the twelfth day of August, 1720, in the village of Sinn, in the principality of Hessen-Nassau, in what is today western Germany. He was the son of Theiss Matthias Weber, born in 1685, and Anna Catherina Schupp, born in 1699, placing his birth within a settled, agrarian Hessian household of the early eighteenth century.

The Hesse-Nassau of Johann Jost's youth was a patchwork of small German states, deeply marked by the long shadow of the Thirty Years' War and by recurring agricultural hardship, religious tension, and military levies imposed by petty princes. It was from precisely such conditions that thousands of German-speaking families were drawn, across the eighteenth century, to recruiters offering passage and land in the British colonies of North America. One such recruitment effort, organized by General Samuel Waldo, brought German settlers to the Broad Bay region of the District of Maine, then a frontier of Massachusetts Bay, in the 1740s and 1750s.

Johann Jost Weber was among those who eventually crossed the Atlantic, for his death is recorded in 1790 at Waldoboro, in Lincoln County, Maine — the very community founded by these Hessian and Palatine immigrants and which retained its German character, language, and Lutheran worship well into the next century. He married Anna Margaretha Mueller, herself of German parentage, and of their union is recorded a daughter, Anna Elizabeth Weber, born in 1751 and long-lived, surviving until 1847 — a lifespan of ninety-six years which carried the family memory of the old country forward into the era of the American republic.

Thus Johann Jost stands at the threshold between the Old World and the New within this branch of the family, the immigrant ancestor who carried the Weber name from the hills of Hesse to the rocky coast of Maine. He was the compiler's seventh great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.