♀Catharina (surname unknown)

Catharina is known only by her first name, which has come down through her daughter’s family. She was possibly the fifth great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her daughter Barbara Landis (1739–1812).

She is said to have been the first wife of Felix Landis (died 1770), a miller and yeoman of Derry Township, then in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and the mother of his daughter Barbara, born in 1739; nothing else of her life is known. Her marriage had ended by February 1763, when Felix’s wife was Mary, whom his will of 1770 calls his second wife, and most likely by 1747, when a Felix Landis of Lebanon Township already had a wife Mary. Felix’s will named five children, among them sons named Felix and Jacob, but it is not known which of them were Catharina’s.

Notes

Her name

A Mennonite family card for Henry Light, who married Barbara Landis in 1759, calls Barbara a daughter of “Felix-Catherine”. The card is a late compilation, and no record of the time names Barbara’s mother or makes Barbara a daughter of Felix Landis of Derry Township. Some family trees give Catharina the surname Böshaar, but no record of the time gives her that name, and it is left out here.

The second wife

The abstract of Felix Landis’s will, made on 25 January 1770 and proved on 3 May, calls his wife Mary his second wife, and Mary was his wife when he sold land in Hanover Township on 9 February 1763. In December 1747 a Felix Landus of Lebanon Township and Mary his wife sold land to Jacob Downer; this was most likely the same man, which would mean that Catharina had died, or the marriage had ended, before Barbara was nine. The will was written in German and was never copied into the county’s will book, and the surviving abstract names only two of the five children, Felix and Jacob, without saying who their mother was.