♀Elizabeth Magdalena Fuchs

Elizabeth Magdalena Fuchs (16 December 1726 – 27 June 1797) was a member of the Fuchs, or Fox, family among the Palatine^W German settlers of New York’s Mohawk and Schoharie valleys, known today through her son and through what his descendants reported. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her son Nicolaus Walrath (1750–1806).

Marriage and family

Henry Z. Jones Jr.^W, in The Palatine Families of New York (1985), names a “Magdalena Fuchs, whom descendants say md. Jacob W. Walrath” among several Fuchs-Fox family members of the Mohawk-Schoharie region whom he could not place in any household. A family history compiled by Walter Bruce Walrod in 1942 calls her Magdalena Fox, gives her birth as 16 December 1726, and makes her the wife of Jacob W. Wallrath, born in 1723, and the mother of fourteen children, the eldest being Nicolaus, born on 3 March 1750 at Stone Arabia, now in Montgomery County. Family trees give her death as 27 June 1797 in Montgomery County, New York. No baptism or burial record naming her has been found.

She is said to have married Jacob Walrath at Stone Arabia on 27 June 1747, a date that Henry Z. Jones Jr.’s second volume takes from the Reformed church book; the same volume notes that some sources say her surname was Fuchs or Fox. Six younger children of the couple were baptized at Stone Arabia between 1756 and 1767.

Parentage

No record of her parents has been found. An online family tree makes her a daughter of Johann Peter Fuchs and his wife, a Salbach, but Jones’s entry for that couple, on the page after the one that names her, lists their children baptized or born between 1703 and 1720 and includes no Magdalena. The same tree had also given her the 1712 baptism of their daughter Anna Elisabetha, fourteen years before her own recorded birth.

Notes

The marriage

Henry Z. Jones Jr.’s The Palatine Families of New York, volume 2, pages 1056–1057, gives Jacob Walrath’s marriage to Magdalena as 27 June 1747, citing the Stone Arabia Reformed church book, and notes that some sources give her surname as Fuchs or Fox. The date therefore rests on that citation. The 1942 family history makes her Jacob’s wife but gives no date for the marriage. Volume 1, page 262, is the earlier reference: it gives the marriage only as what descendants say, and it places her in no household.

The children

The six younger children are known from online indexes, which disagree on the months for the children that appear in both, so no months are given here. The 1942 family history gives fourteen children, and seven are accounted for here. Neither Stone Arabia church book has a child of the couple before 1756.