The Zons family, also known as Zuns, took their name from their origin, the Lower Rhine town of Zonz near Neuss. The founder of the family, Michael Zons, migrated to Frankfurt in 1495 with his immediate family. His son Herts married into the Cahn family and converted a stall which originally belonged to the Cahn family house into the Sonne. The next two generations achieved prosperity and status in the Judengasse. Herts Zons, a great grandson living at the start of the 17th century, built the Holunderbaum next to the Sonne and owned the houses Reuse and Goldener Hirsch, where the descendants of the family lived until into the 19th century. At the beginning of the 18th century Michael Alexander Zons lived here, a major trader in bills of exchange as a specific form of money lending and banking, dealing with Amsterdam, Hamburg, Vienna, Metz and Nancy. At the time of its went bankruptcy in 1717 the firm Samuel & Meyer Levy in Nancy still had 60,000 guilders in claims against him based on bills of exchange, which in those days was a great fortune. The creditors of Samuel & Meyer Levy tried to recover their losses from Zons, and had him imprisoned for 18 weeks. Other Frankfurt businessmen were affected by Levy's bankruptcy, for example the Schuster family.