♂Christian Stauffer

Christian Stauffer (about 1579 – about 1672) was a man of the Emmental, in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, who married Adelheid Oppliger at Röthenbach on 18 June 1610 and raised a family in the neighboring parishes of Signau and Röthenbach. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Hans Stauffer.

Marriage and family

Christian is said to have been born about 1579 on the Luchsmatt farm at Eggiwil, the son of Niclaus Stauffer. Christian Stauffer and Adelheid Oppliger were married at Röthenbach im Emmental on 18 June 1610, with the consent of Johannes Rudolf, the pastor of Signau. The couple had five children christened between 1611 and 1622, among them Hans, christened at Signau on 18 April 1613, whom the register enters as the child of Christen Stouffer and Adelheit Obliger.

The preacher

Christian was probably the Anabaptist^W preacher Christian Stauffer who was imprisoned at Thun in 1644 and exiled from Switzerland in October 1671, when he was past ninety. He is said to have died in the Palatinate^W about 1672.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his son Hans and Hans’s daughter Anna Stauffer (born about 1644), and they meet again in Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977), the mother of Ora Emogene Walrath, whose parents Thomas Koons (1855–1938) and Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923) both descended from Christian.

Notes

What rests on the registers

His marriage rests on the Röthenbach register, which enters it as “Christen Stouffer, und Adelheit Oppliger, mit verwilligung Herr Johannes Rudolffen, Predicanten zu Signouw, 18 Junij 1610” (with the consent of Herr Johannes Rudolf, preacher at Signau). Hans’s christening on 18 April 1613 is in the Signau register. An online abstract of that register dates it 18 April 1612, but the page falls among entries headed 1613.

Birth and parents

His birth about 1579 on the Luchsmatt farm comes from compiled genealogies of the Stauffer family; Richard W. Davis gives about 1580. Davis, in Emigrants, Refugees and Prisoners, makes him a son of Niclaus Stauffer, who owned Luchsmatt in 1597 and died there in 1615. An online family tree names his mother as Catharina Lehman, without a source. The Röthenbach register for 1578 to 1581 has no christening for a child of Niclaus Stauffer, and the register of Signau, the parish in which Luchsmatt lay, begins only in 1589, so no entry survives to confirm his parents.

The preacher and his son Hans

That Hans Stauffer, the husband of Madlena Neuenschwander and father of Anna, was Christian’s son rests on Davis. His article “Four Generations of the Descendants of Michael Schenk and Anna Stauffer”, Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage (January 1994), says of Anna: “Her grandfather was the Anabaptist preacher Christian Stauffer who was imprisoned at Thun in 1644 and exiled in October 1671”. Davis’s The Stauffer Families of Switzerland, Germany and America (1992) places Hans among the children of Christian and Adelheid. Two other boys named Hans, sons of men named Christen Stauffer, were christened nearby in 1611 and 1612, at Signau and Steffisburg.

His death

An online family tree gives his death as 6 April 1672, at Ibersheim in one place and at Dirmstein in another, both in the Palatinate, aged about 93. The same day is the date of a 1672 survey of the Swiss refugees at Adelshofen, so the exact day may have been borrowed from it; only the year is given here.