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Origin of surname Glattfelder: the Family came from Glattfelden, Switzerland in 1742. Glattfelden established in mid 16th century in the Canton of Zurich. And Glattfelder is, and was, the designation given to the residents of the village of Glattfelden. When Glatfelders arrived in non German speaking parts of America the name gained a phonetic English spelling. The G sound in Swiss German is hard and comes from the back of the throat and the A is short, so one can understand the reason for the different way that English speakers might spell our last name.
The question of why Johann Peter and Casper bundled up their families to sail a quarter of the way around the globe and leaving behind all they knew. It’s good to remember the Switzerland that they were born in was very different from the country that we know today. Back then it was a poor country of subsistence farmers ruled by a hereditary elite. Also the beginning of the 18th cent. was in the middle the “little ice age” when temperatures were substantially colder than the mean, and crop failures across Northern Europe were common and famine was endemic. This was when every church parish was required by law to record the names of all those fleeing the country.
This was also the time of war. The “thirty years war” had ended in 1648 and sent war refugees from the Rhineland & Palatinate streaming down the Rhine, out to England and from there to the Americas. That era from the end of the 30 yrs war to and the founding of the Swiss Helvetic Republic in 1798 saw a series of revolts by the rural poor against the established order, and also civil wars between the different Swiss cantons. There were already at least a half dozen of these military conflicts by the time Johann Peter and Casper decided to leave Swizerland, and another 50 years before a Switzerland that we would recognize emerged.
We should also remember that the Mennonites and Anabaptist fled Switzerland a decade before our ancestors left so Johann Peter and Casper had an example to follow. And after the Palatinate migration they would have known that there would be German speakers in the country that they were fleeing to.