Swiss records indicate the Menziken, Switzerland birth of Peter Merz, son of Jacob.

For a long time, I only suspected Peter was David’s father but I didn’t know much more about Peter and it seemed there may have been as many as three different Peter’s of that place and time, at least there were three different women married to one.

Fredy Mertz found a document of the wedding of Peter MERTZ son of Jacob MERTZ mayor in Rosenwiller native from Menziken in the Berner area with Barbara Zimmermann daughter of Benedict Zimmermann on May 1st 1689 in a reformed church of Strasbourg.

He also found the signature of Peter MERZ (without T) son of Jacob MERTZ from Rosenwiller, as godfather at a baptism in the registers of Rosenwiller collected in Detwiller. It was on 23 Feb 1689 and it was for the daughter Anna of (unknown).

Ron Mertz, whose DNA links him to me as some kind of distant cousin, thought he descends from Jacob’s son Peter who married a woman named Maria Brandli in 1687

But it wasn’t until Robert Mertz found the notarial act listing two wives for Peter (neither being Maria Brandli) and that David was the son of Peter by his first wife Barbara Zimmerman that everything came together.

We know the name of her father from the notarial act.

Over the years, suspecting Peter was David’s father, I had a long list of possible candidates to be David’s mother, Maria Brandli being one of them. Before her, I thought that a woman named Christena Rueckler may have been. That idea came from a document titled "Descendants of Joseph Schneider" which my genealogy friend Patty Mertz sent me, and which she found at the Berks Historical Society (I believe). In places, this document is well researched and well sourced, but there seem to be plenty of mistakes too in delineating the Mertz family once it arrived in the New World. The fact that David named a daughter Christina gave some credence to this theory.

But all those theories were wrong. Peter’s first wife, mother of David, was Barbara Zimmerman.