♂Clarence Edward Koons

Clarence Edward Koons (18 November 1893 – 28 October 1975) was a man of Clay County, Illinois, who married Lenora May Tate and raised nine children, moving the family back and forth between Flora, Illinois and Blaine County, Oklahoma, so that the children were born in two states. He was the younger brother of Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977), the mother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014).

Early life

Clarence was born in Illinois on 18 November 1893, the youngest of the four surviving children of Thomas Koons (1855–1938) and Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923), and eight years younger than his sister Mary Magdalene. His mother’s entry in the 1910 census gives eight children born and four living. The census of 1900 found him aged six in his parents’ household in Harter Township, Clay County, and a 1910 census index places him there still. That year his sister married Clarence Eugene Walrath and soon left Illinois, and in the 1910s his parents moved on to Oklahoma.

Marriage and family

Clarence married Lenora May Tate (1896–1969), the daughter, according to a Find a Grave memorial, of Charles Judson Tate and Martha Alice Kinnaman; the couple’s grave memorial gives the year of the marriage as 1915. Their first child, Sylvia Goldie, was born at Flora in November 1915. By June 1917, when their son Earl was born at Southard, they were living in Blaine County, Oklahoma, the county where his mother was later buried, and five children, Earl among them, were born there, at Southard, Okeene and Homestead, between 1917 and 1925. The census of 1920 found the family at Carleton, in Blaine County. By July 1927, when their son Fred Devere was born, they were back at Flora, and they stayed. In all the couple had nine children, six sons and three daughters; one son, born at Okeene in 1918, was named Bernice.

The later censuses place the family at Flora, in Harter Township, from 1935 through 1950. Their son Leslie Leland Koons died at Flora in January 2021, the last of the nine; his obituary names all eight brothers and sisters as having died before him.

Death

Find a Grave gives Lenora May Koons’s death as 1 June 1969. It and a FamilySearch death index give Clarence’s as 28 October 1975, six years later; his last residence was Flora, but the records seen so far do not give the place of his death. The Find a Grave memorial records his burial beside Lenora in the Odd Fellows Cemetery at Xenia, in Clay County.

Notes

A World War I draft registration and a state military roster for a Clarence E. Koons born in 1893 belong to a different man: he was born on 23 August 1893 in Orange Township, Ohio, lived at Westerville, and farmed for a Henry Koons. This Clarence was born in Illinois in November 1893 and was living with his parents in Clay County, and his family is not known to have lived in Ohio. Koons was a common surname in Ohio at the time, and the Ohio roster page alone lists eleven men of that name. His own draft registration has not been found.