Mary and Johannes Meyer

Date: About 1680 to about 1780
Location: Pennsylvania, United States
Surnames/tags: meyer swiss_anabaptist

The puzzle : Who was Mary?

Johannes Meyer (c.1684-1757) names his wife as Mary, in his will dated 1756. It is assumed that Mary and Johannes married before they emigrated to Pennsylvania and that she was also the mother of all his children. But who was she?

Some online trees identify her as Mary Lenhardy, although this probably conflates her with Mary Lenhardy, wife of a different Hans Meyer.

Why do we care?

If we could work out who Mary was, we would have a clear connection between two pre-immigration families.

This would help us to locate both families in Europe c.1707 (when Mary and Johannes might be expected to have married).

Ultimately, it might also help to trace the Meyer family to their ancestral town or village in Switzerland. At the moment, there are at least 4 possible ancestral couples from whom the Meyer family might descend.

What could mt-DNA testing tell us?

Mary is assumed to have been the mother of Johannes’s 3 daughters :

1. Barbara who married Jacob Coffman - but had no daughters of her own
2. Mary who married Peter Brillhart - and had 5 daughters
3. Catherine who married Jacob Bechtel - and whose daughters have not yet been traced

We would hope to :

• Locate matrilineal descendants who would be willing to participate in mt-DNA testing.
• Explore their mt-DNA matches to see if any of those matches are also descendants of Mennonite families.
• If links to other Mennonite families are found, consider whether those links support or contradict existing hypotheses about family connections.
• Create a new hypothesis about family connections, if necessary.

If you are a matrilineal descendant of one of Mary's daughters, please leave a message, or send a PM to the profile managers.

(Return to Swiss Anabaptist mt-DNA)