05a - Our Hiestands (Heystandts) - Refugees in Friedrichstadt on the North Sea
“Heystandt” was the way the Hollander-Dutch spelled our Hiestand name.
In 1689 Ibersheim and the entire Palatinate again became a hot war zone. Five years after hereditary tenant rights were granted to the ten Mennonite families, French troops of Louis XIV invaded the Palatinate in 1688, launching the Nine Years War or the War of the Grand Alliance.
Mennonites from Ibersheim and many other villages in the Rhineland were forced to seek refuge away from homes they had expended a great deal of effort to build and farms they had labored hard to reclaim from the devastation of the previous war. Most, if not all, of them fled the area and some became refugees in the Netherlands.
Hans Jacob Hiestand led a group of Palatine Mennonites to join a Dutch community in Friedrichstadt on the North Sea. There they were able to rent farms and enjoy a fair measure of religious tolerance. The parents of our Henrich Hiestand were very probably in this group.
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