Theiss Matthias Weber

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Theiss Matthias Weber (1685–?), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Hessen-Nassau, parentage, marriage to Anna Catherina Schupp, his son Johann Jost Weber, and his eventual settlement at the German colony of Broad Bay (Waldoboro), Maine, with era context on 18th-century German emigration.

Theiss Matthias Weber, born the eleventh of October, 1685, in the village of Fleisbach in the principality of Hessen-Nassau in the German lands, occupies a distant but firmly documented place in the compiler's ancestry. He was the son of Johann Philippi Weber (1654–1724) and Anna Elisabetha Kuntz (1658–1718), a household rooted in the small farming and craft communities of central Germany that lined the Dill and Lahn river valleys in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. The region in those years bore the weary marks of the Thirty Years' War still recent in memory, and Lutheran parish life ordered the rhythm of baptism, marriage, and burial through which families such as the Webers can today be traced.

Theiss Matthias took to wife Anna Catherina Schupp, and of their union is recorded a son, Johann Jost Weber, born in 1720 and living until 1790, through whom the Weber line descends to the compiler. The date and circumstance of Theiss Matthias's death have not been preserved, but the family record places his end at Broad Bay, in the district of Maine — the settlement later known as Waldoboro. Broad Bay was, in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the destination of an organized emigration of German-speaking Protestants recruited by Samuel Waldo to plant a colony on the Maine coast. Many of those settlers came from precisely the Hessian and Palatine districts in which the Webers had lived for generations, and a number of them carried with them families and aged kin. That a man born in Fleisbach in 1685 should have ended his days on the rocky shore of the Gulf of Maine is, accordingly, a journey both extraordinary and characteristic of his time.

Theiss Matthias Weber stands as an 8× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother line.