Maria Steiner was born Switzerland in the early 17th century. She married Hans Heinrich Hirtzel on January 12, 1646, perhaps in what is now Solothurn, Switzerland, near Bern. But their first child was born in Sulzberg, apparently a village near Pfäffikon, near Zurich; Pfäffikon is the reported birthplace of husband.
They had at least six children: Cathrina (1648), Verena (1650), Hans Heinrich (1652), Anna (May 29, 1654), Maria Barbara (December 28, 1656), and Clemens (February 20, 1658 or 1659).
Between 1652 and 1654 they apparently emigrated to the village of Reihen in Baden in what is now Germany. The canton of Zurich is about two hundred miles south of Reihen. The Rhine River would be the obvious route between the two.
Place names associated with the couple are confused.
Maria Steiner is said to have been born in "Battercking, District of Bern." There is no place by that name in Switzerland at this time. There is a Bätterkinden municipality in the Emmental district in the canton of Berne.
Their marriage is said to have taken place in "Lyssingen District." Again, such a place does not exist in present-day Switzerland. Google gave as an alternative Esslingen, a village in the municipality of Egg, Switzerland, in the canton of Zürich. An online source, however, identifies "Lyssingen" with modern Solothurn, north of Bern, which is in walking distance from Bätterkinden.
Historical context:
Maria Steiner was married about two years before the end of the devastating Thirty Years' War in central Europe. The war grew out of an effort by the Habsburgs and their Catholic allies to restore Catholic dominance over states within the Holy Roman Empire whose princes, dukes, electors, etc., had gone over the Lutheranism or Calvinism. But the war was about religion as an aspect of power, not about belief. Individuals were expected to embrace the faith of their ruler or accept exile (and the faith of the ruler was changeable).
The place where Maria Steiner was born and the place to which she emigrated were Calvinist.
The war was set off by Bohemian rejection of the very Catholic Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria as crown prince of what was then largely Protestant Bohemia. The Bohemians expressed themselves through the Defenestration of Prague – Ferdinand's representatives were thrown out of a window of Prague Castle.
The warring parties made peace, for the time being, in Westphalia in 1648.
Reihen, where the Hirtzels emigrated in the early 1650s, was in Baden, which is said to have suffered severely in the war. Perhaps the destruction made opportunities for the emigrants.
