♂Hans Stauffer

Hans Stauffer was a man of Eggiwil, in the Emmental in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, whose daughter Catharina was christened there on 10 September 1648, less than three months after the parish began to keep a register of baptisms. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Anna Stauffer (born about 1644).

Eggiwil

Hans Stauffer and Madlena Neuenschwander appear together in the first Eggiwil register: on 10 September 1648 their daughter Catharina was christened there, with Barbara Galli and Catharina Salzman among her godparents. The register writes the parents Hans Stouffer and Madlena Neuwenschwander. When and where they married, when Madlena was born and when either of them died are not known.

He was christened at Signau, in the canton of Bern, on 18 April 1613, the son of Christen Stauffer and Adelheid Oppliger. His father was probably the Anabaptist^W preacher Christian Stauffer, who was imprisoned at Thun in 1644 and exiled from Switzerland in October 1671. Hans and Madlena are said to have had two more children: Anna, who married Michael Schenk at Eggiwil on 21 September 1660 and went with him into exile in 1671, and a son Hans, who left the Palatinate^W for Pennsylvania in November 1709.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his daughter Anna and her son Christen, christened at Eggiwil on 15 June 1662, who was most likely the Christian Shank (died 1724) of Pennsylvania. They divide in the nineteenth century between Cattarina Gingerich’s sons Samuel Kunz (1825–1904) and Jacob John Kunz (1814–1866), and meet again when Samuel’s son Thomas Koons (1855–1938) married Jacob’s daughter Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923). Their daughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977) was the mother of Ora Emogene Walrath.

Notes

The christening at Signau

The Signau baptism register (Taufrodel, 1589–1618), in the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Bern (K Signau 1), records the christening of Hans on 18 April 1613 and names his parents as Christen Stauffer and Adelheid Oppliger, the mother written Adelheit in the register. The register does not say whether its Christen Stauffer was the preacher Christian Stauffer described below.

The 1648 christening

Catharina’s christening is the last entry on the first page of the Eggiwil baptism register, which was begun on 20 June 1648. It is the only entry that names Hans and Madlena as a couple. An online index of the register gives the child’s name as Hans, her father’s name, but the register itself reads “Infans: Catharina”.

What rests on a family history

That Hans and Madlena were the parents of Anna, who married Michael Schenk, comes from Richard W. Davis, “Four Generations of the Descendants of Michael Schenk and Anna Stauffer”, Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage (January 1994), as do the preacher, the son Hans and Anna’s exile. Davis cites the Eggiwil church register for Anna’s parents, and his own The Stauffer Families of Switzerland, Germany and America (1992) for the preacher. Anna was born about 1643 or 1644, before the Eggiwil register begins, so no surviving entry names her parents; the 1648 christening shows a Hans Stauffer and a Madlena Neuenschwander raising a family at Eggiwil four years later.

The preacher Christian Stauffer

Davis calls Christian Stauffer Anna’s grandfather without saying on which side. Her mother’s father would have been a Neuenschwander, so a grandfather named Stauffer points to Hans’s father.

Two Hans Stauffers

Another Hans Stauffer, who married Adelheid Schnyder at Röthenbach in the mid-1590s, has his own page. By Davis’s account he was the grandfather of Anna’s husband, Michael Schenk, through Michael’s mother, who was also named Anna Stauffer.