Speech on the Occasion of the DAR/SAR Hauser Family Patriot Celebration
7 July 2007, Bethania, North Carolina
by Rolland K. “Rollie” Hauser
Good morning. My name is Rolland K. Hauser. I am the current vice-president of our Hauser family association. My wife and I live in Chico in northern California.
My goal this morning is to leave you with some appreciation of the nature and personali-ty of my fifth great-grandfather, one of the Hauser family Patriots – Martin Hauser, Jr. The details of what I know of this ancestor of mine come: 1) from his and his wife’s Memoirs, which are extant in the Moravian Church Archives held [then] at the Salem College Library here in Winston-Salem; 2) from Hauser-family cousin, Adelaide Fries’s volumes of the Records of the Moravians in North Carolina; and 3) from some of my own research into the history of my own branch of our family.
Martin Hauser, Jr. was a native-born citizen of the New World. He and his twin brother, Jacob, Sr., were born in the fall of 1733 among the German-speaking settlers of the Perkiomen Valley of Skippack Township – located about ten miles north-northeast of Valley Forge in (now) Montgomery County, in the Penn family’s English Colony, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Martin “looked upon it as a special preservation of God that in his fourth year he had been saved from the danger of drowning. Soon after this his parents had him baptized as a Lutheran” – the religion of his Alsatian emigrant father, Martin Haúßer/Hauser, Sr.
Martin, Jr. came to the frontier, the Yadkin River Valley, of the Province of North Carolina at the age of twenty with his family in October of 1753. But two years later after the harvest of 1755, aged twenty-two, he struck off on his own. He left the Haúßer/Hauser homestead (located between present-day Clemmons and Lewisville) and returned to the Maryland-Pennsylvania border county, where his twin brother still lived (having remained behind) and where his father still owned fifty acres of land about twelve miles southeast of present-day Gettysburg.
Then in the fall of 1759, Martin’s twin brother, Jacob, finally left Maryland to join his family in North Carolina for the first time, and lived in his parents’ house in the upper part of the new Moravian farming village of Bethania. In July 1760, back in Maryland, twenty-six-year-old Martin, Jr. married Miss Susanna Maria Kessler. Susan had traveled to the New World as a seventeen-year-old orphan. She was a Hessian from the Earldom of Hanau, and she had recently completed her seven-year obligation to repay her fare by working as an indentured servant.
Martin was unique among the Hauser brothers of the Yadkin Valley. He married a young woman whose Colonial immigrant experiences lay beyond those of the Moravian theocratic cul-ture associated with the close-knit communities of Wachovia.