| Notes |
- “Stahly is a very common name in Switzerland, especially around the lakes of Thun and Brienz at the foot of the Alps. Their Amish roots start in the village of Oberhofen, and nearby village of Hilterfingen on the north shore of Lake Thun. There are several different spellings for this name – Stehli, Stähli, Stehli, and Stelli, to list the common ones. The most used Swiss spelling is Stähli. The name means “steel one” or “iron one”, suggesting that the first person with this name was a blacksmith. The first time this name is documented is in 1321 and again in 1406 when it appears in the church records at Ottenbach. This area of Switzerland was the home of the Swiss Oberlanders under Bishop Jacob Amman. The name appears often in records of the Oberlander followers of Amman. . . .
“There are two Stahly families in the United States. One settled in the Elkhart County area of Northern Indiana, and the other settled in Central Illinois and Nebraska. No direct linkage for these two families has been found to date.
“Ulrich Zwingly founded the Swiss Reformed Church at Easter, 1525. Canton Bern remained officially Catholic until February 7, 1528.1 The conflict between Zwingly’s Swiss Reformed Church (SRC) and the Täufer was soon the subject of discussions called disputations. In 1532, one of these disputations was held in the village of Zofingen, which is northeast of Bern and was a part of canton Bern at that time. (It is now a part of canton Aargau). At the meeting was Georg Stäheli, who was present as a minister of the SRC. “
|
