♀Barbara Landis

Barbara Landis (19 March 1739 – 16 April 1812) was a woman of Lebanon Township, Pennsylvania, who married the yeoman Henry Light and was the mother of his twelve children, all of whom outlived their father. She was probably the fourth great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her son Henry Light (died 1830).

Marriage and family

She is said to have been a daughter of Felix Landis of Derry Township, then in Lancaster County, who died in 1770, and of his earlier wife, Catharina. Henry Light and Barbara Landis married about 1759. On 19 November 1759 Henry bought 155 acres near the town of Lebanon from his brothers and sisters. They had twelve children, all of them living in 1807: Henry, John, Elizabeth, Peter, Veronica, Maria, Anna, Jacob, Martin, Joseph, Barbara and Catharine. In July 1802 Henry and Barbara sold land to their son Peter, of Bethel Township, for £912.

Widowhood

When Henry made his will in April 1803, he provided for her “in lieu of her Third”, the share of his estate that the law gave a widow as her dower^W. Of the £2,000 their son Joseph was to pay for the plantation where they lived, £700 was to stay on the land as long as Barbara lived, and Joseph was to pay her the interest each year; only after her death was that money to be shared among the children. Henry died on 7 January 1806. Barbara outlived him by six years and died on 16 April 1812. Her gravestone, carved in German, names her “Barbara Lichtin”, the feminine form of Licht, and calls her the wife of Henrich Licht.

Notes

Her parents

A Mennonite family card for Henry Light calls Barbara “dau Felix-Catherine”, and Felix Landis of Derry Township, who died in 1770, fits her by time and place. The card spells her mother’s name Catherine, where this page uses Catharina. Some family trees give the mother the surname Böshaar, but no record of the time gives her that name, and it is left out here. His will, dated 25 January 1770 and proved on 3 May, was written in German and so could not be recorded; the surviving abstract names his second wife, Mary, and only two of his five children, Felix and Jacob. A deed of 2 December 1747 names a Felix Landus of Lebanon Township and his wife Mary, so if he was the same man, he had remarried by the time Barbara was eight. No record of the time names Barbara as his daughter, and her gravestone gives no maiden name. The will of a widow Barbara Landis of Derry, made in 1811, is another woman’s: she had young children still to be schooled and apprenticed.

Her dates

Her gravestone gives her birth as March 1739 and her death as 16 April 1812; the third figure of the death year is worn, but the year ends in 2 and the age on the stone is in the seventies, which fits only 1812. The day of her birth, 19 March, is the Mennonite family card’s, which gives her dates as 19 March 1738 and 16 April 1813, a year off at both ends.

The marriage

No record of the marriage is known, so the year is an estimate. It comes from the Mennonite family cards: one gives 1759, and another gives 1759 or 1760.

Her son Henry

The line to Ora Emogene Walrath is taken to run through the couple’s son Henry. The release of 1807 names him as Henry Light of Bethel Township, with a wife Magdalena, and in 1797 the will of Martin Founk the elder called his daughter “Magdelena now the wife of Henry Light the younger”. The Henry Light who died in Swatara Township in 1830 named his wife Magdalena in his will. The 1807 release makes Henry of Bethel their son; what no record of the time says is that he was the Henry who died in Swatara in 1830, though Swatara was cut from Bethel in 1813 and both men had a wife Magdalena. The county held more than one Henry Light. An 1896 Light family history, a Mennonite family card and a lineage book of the Daughters of the American Revolution all make him their son, and DNA shared between descendants of his children and descendants of Henry and Barbara’s other children supports the link.