♀Amelia Koons

Amelia Koons (9 March 1845 – 31 March 1919) was a farm wife of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, who married Henry F. Umberger, raised six sons and gave a home in turn to her widowed mother and an unmarried sister; when she died in 1919, one of her sons was still serving in France with the American Expeditionary Forces. She was the elder sister of Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923), the grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014).

Early life

Amelia was born on 9 March 1845, one of the ten children of Jacob John Kunz (1814–1866) and Magdalene Holdeman (1821–1885). The family name was written in many ways; a census index gives her as “Emillia Koons” in 1850, when the family lived in Union Township, and as “Amelia Kuhns” in 1860, when they lived in Swatara Township, near Jonestown, where her father farmed as a tenant. A Find a Grave memorial gives her father’s death as 1866.

Marriage and family

She married Henry F. Umberger, and she was known for the rest of her life as Amelia Umberger. A census index places the couple in North Lebanon Township in 1880 with their young sons, and her widowed mother and her unmarried sister Juliana in the household. A Find a Grave memorial gives her mother’s death as 16 February 1885, and the family tree places the death at the house of Henry and Amelia Umberger. The couple had six sons in all: Samuel, David, Henry, John A., Joseph and William.

Henry Umberger died in 1908. Amelia stayed on for a time at the Umberger farm in Bethel Township; a census index has her in 1910, a widow, in Swatara Township, with her sons Henry and William and her sister Juliana. She later lived with a sister in North Lebanon Township. In January 1916 the Lebanon Daily News reported that Mrs. Amelia Umberger, “residing near the Ebenezer dam”, had slipped on a board walk in the yard beside her home and broken both bones of her right wrist.

Death

About five months before her death she moved into Lebanon, to the house of her son Joseph, a rural mail carrier^W, at 517 Canal Street. She died there on 31 March 1919, aged 74. The Daily News notice of her funeral named her six sons: Samuel at Jonestown, David near Myerstown, Henry at Forneydale, John A. at Harrisburg, Joseph in Lebanon, and William, who was then “serving with the American Expeditionary force in France”. The fighting had ended the previous November, but many American soldiers were not sent home until the spring and summer of 1919. She was survived by her brother Joseph Koons, of Furnace Hill, and by three sisters: Matilda Tice, Sarah Koons of Rembrandt, Iowa, and Magdalena Koons of Homestead, Oklahoma. The paper called Sarah and Magdalena “Miss”, but both had married men named Koons, so their surnames never changed.

Amelia was a member of St. John’s Reformed Church at Fredericksburg. The funeral was held on Thursday 3 April 1919 at the Canal Street house, with a service by the Rev. C. M. Rissinger at St. John’s, and she was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery, Fredericksburg.

Notes

Her death certificate gives her birth as 9 March 184–, with the last digit hard to read; the family’s own records of the ten children give 9 March 1845, the date used here. The certificate names her parents as “J Jacob Kunz” and “Magdalena Haldeman”.