European Origins:
Other Jacob Hite

DNA testing proved that the “Other Jacob” Hite and his family were related to the large Heyd/Heid family centered in the villages of Honau, Unterhausen, and Oberhausen, located just south of the city of Reutlingen in the modern-day German state of Baden-Württemburg. In the 18th century, this area was located in Württemburg. Jacob Hite was not born in one of the three aforementioned villages. A thorough search of the records there has shown that all of the men named Jacob Heyd born in any of the villages in the correct time frame remained there and died there. Therefore, an earlier ancestor of Jacob must have left the area for another location in Germany. A man whose Y-DNA reading matched that of Jacob’s descendants is a descendant of Christian Heid (1837-1877) who was born in Honau and came to America in 1867, settling in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. Christian Heid’s earliest documented ancestor was Esaias Heid, who married to a woman named Anna Barbara in Oberhausen in 1648. Jacob might be a direct descendant of Esaias or he might be related to him in some other way. There were numerous other Heid households in the three villages in the lifetime of Esaias Heid, all of who presumably shared a common male line ancestor a century or two before.

The area of Baden-Württemburg where this family lived was a part of Württemburg before the two states were merged after World War II.