Biography Gabriel Stephens 1645 - 1720 At his baptism Gabriel was sponsored by and named for Gabriel Frauenfelder, the schoolmaster at Henggart. Gabriel was only a youth of ten or eleven when his family emigrated from Switzerland to the Kraichgau region of the German Rhineland. He may have grown up and married at Sinsheim, about 15 miles southeast of Heidelberg but the early parish records of Sinsheim were lost when a disastrous fire, set by invading French troops, destroyed the entire town in 1689. Gabriel definitely married elsewhere before settling down at Steinsfurt, about two miles east of Sinsheim. The records of the Reformed Church at Steinsfurt date from 1656 but Gabriel and Barbara first appear there with the baptism of a daughter, Elisabetha, in 1670. Many members of the Reformed congregations at Sinsheim and Steinsfurt were Swiss immigrants who moved into the area after the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Probably because of this, the pastor at Steinsfurt followed the Swiss custom of giving the mother's original family name in the baptismal records. Bar is a common name in the Albis region of Canton Zurich and a number of Bar families from there moved to the Kraichgau region of Germany in the seventeenth century but Barbara's parentage is still unknown. Gabriel was of Swiss origin, and only arrived in Steinsfurt as an adult, but nevertheless, quickly became a leader of the community. By 1676 he is called the Gerichts (a magistrate -similar to a justice of the peace) and by 1695 is called Chur-Pfalz Anwalt (the local prosecutor for the Elector Palatine). According to a deposition Gabriel made in June 1719, in a hearing about tithes to the church, he had been living in Steinsfurt for 50 years and had been a magistrate in the community for 47 years. He also stated that he owned several plots of farmland and had two cows (from Hans Appenzeller, historian/archivist at Steinsfurt). By the time Gabriel died at Steinsfurt in 1720, most of his children had married and moved away or were deceased. The record of his death states that he died suddenly of a stroke at the age of 78 (sic). Barbara died nine years earlier at age 67. About 1668 Gabriel married Bärbara Bar. The two of them had eleven children. The last one was Hans Peter, who was our immigrant ancestor. Gabriel died April 2, 1720 and Bärbara died September 2, 1711 in Steinsfurt.