John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 735

One of the inhabitants of the Little Fork was John Button.  B. C. Holtzclaw thought that perhaps he was the son of (Jan) Daniel Bouton, a 1739 immigrant.  Holtzclaw furthermore thought that Daniel Bouton was not from Nassau-Siegen but perhaps from Holland and of Huguenot descent.  Frank Dake, now deceased, did much research in Europe and probably identified the family.  This research was reported in Beyond Germanna in volume 7, the July issue (#4).  This research shows a possible connection between the Young and Button families.

During the Thirty Years' War, the Swedish forces were in control of the Nassau-Siegen for a while.  During this time, a member of the Jung (Young) family of Siegen, a Christoph Jung, was the Protestant Reformed pastor of Gundersheim (Kreis Worms) about eighty miles to the south.  He was last there in 1635, the end of the Schwedenzeit (Swedish time).  Christoph was of Siegen meaning he was born there.  He matriculated at Herborn, about 25 miles to the southeast of Siegen on 2 December 1615 and again on 2 July 1618 when a notation was made in the record that he was the pastor at Seelbach.  Later he served at Gundersheim and died at nearby Alzey some time after April 1635.  He perhaps also served at Altenkirchen, near Herborn, as his son Wilhelm, another minister, was "of" Altenkirchen.  Wilhelm Jung was the pastor at Ostheim (now Ostheim-Nidderau) 1650-1662 and Marköbel (now Marköbel-Hammerbach) 1662-1697.

Wilhelm Jung and his wife, Anna Maria Dietz, had eleven children, one of whom, Maria Margarete, married, as his second wife, Jacob Bouton (Jakob Boutton) of Hanau who was the son of the Huguenot David Bouton by his second wife, Rachel Haseur.  David was born in Metz, France, went as a young man to Hanau, in Hesse, married and became a businessman there (from the French Reformed Church in Hanau).  One of Jacob's sons was Jean Daniel, baptized in the French Reformed Church in Hanau on 25 Jan 1691.  His German name was Johann Daniel and the Bouton surname was occasionally spelled as Boutton and Button in the Hanau records.  Jean passed through Holland, where his first name would have been Jan, on his way to England and thence to Philadelphia on the ship Samuel where he arrived, age 48, and took the oath of allegiance on 27 August 1739.  The ship's captain spelled the surname as Buttong, which is an approximate phonetic spelling of the nasal sounding name in French, especially if the pronunciation were influenced by German.  He wrote his name as Bouton.  He was naturalized as a resident of Philadelphia on 1 Feb 1746 with the name Johann Daniel Bouton.

It was not unusual in the case of Johann Daniel that he was a city dweller as most of his ancestors had been city dwellers as opposed to farmers, the much more common occupation.  His father, Jacob, was a beer brewer in Hanau.  His grandfather, David, was a businessman in the Hanau suburbs.  His great-grandfather, Theodore Bouton was a hatter in Metz.  His grandfather and great-grandfather Jungs were city dwellers as ministers.

It is extremely probable that B. C. Holtzclaw was essentially correct and that the details have been supplied by Frank Dake through his research in the European records.  Frank was very cautious, as is the mark of a good genealogist, to make a positive identification but it seems to me to be very probable that John Button of the Little Fork, whose neighbor in the Little Fork was John Young, was the man identified by Frank.  It is seen that the Buttons do have a root in Nassau-Siegen.

Frank Dake, whose full name was Benjamin Frank Dake, III, wrote material in which the references took up as much space as the text itself.  And his notes were not trivial.  Most often the references referred to material written in German or English, two languages which Frank spoke.  He was a member of genealogical societies in Europe (three French, two Swiss, and one German).