♂Hans Funk

Hans Funk (died 1752) was a Mennonite farmer of Reihen, a village near Sinsheim in the Kraichgau, in Baden, whose sons Martin and Hans left for Pennsylvania and wrote home for their share of his estate. He was probably the fifth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his son Martin Funk (1732–1796).

Family and estate

He is said to have been the son of another Hans Funk, a farmer and preacher of the Mennonite congregation on the Streichenberg estate, who died at Reihen on 5 September 1734 at the age of seventy-three. The younger Hans bought a farm at Reihen on 12 May 1725. He and his wife, whose name is not known, had five children: Heinrich, who stayed at Reihen and farmed there; Jakob, who rented a farm; Martin and Hans, who went to Pennsylvania; and a daughter.

By May 1752 Hans and his wife had both died, and on 17 May their house, fields and goods were shared out by lot among the five children, Martin’s lot taking in a fifth share of the house. The town book of Reihen, as quoted to the family’s historian two centuries later, records that on 7 April 1753 two Mennonites of Ittlingen presented a letter from “Hans and Martin Funk, in Pennsylvania, surviving sons of the former local Mennonite Hans Funk”, asking for the shares that had fallen to the two of them to be sold, or else left to their brother Heinrich, and the money sent across to them. The younger Hans’s fields went to the highest bidders, and in 1755 Martin’s share passed by sale to Heinrich.

Notes

How his life is known

Hans Funk is known only from Edward Bowman Espenshade’s My American Ancestors and Their Descendants (1950), which prints in translation letters written to the author in 1947 and 1948 by a Funk family of Waghäusel, in Baden, descended from Hans’s son Heinrich. The letters give the farm bought on 12 May 1725, his death in 1752 and the five children, and copy two entries from “an old book of records in the mayor’s office in Richen”, as they spell Reihen, dated 7 April 1753 and 12 March 1755. The later entry dates the lot both 17 May and 5 May 1752, and calls Martin “the eldest brother”, though the letters list Heinrich first; the order of the children’s births is not known. The same letters are the only source for his father, the preacher who died in 1734. The correspondent wrote that Martin and his parents were not entered in the birth register, because they were Mennonites, who did not join the state churches.

His son Martin

That Hans Funk of Reihen was the father of Martin Funk of Lebanon Township, Pennsylvania, is Espenshade’s identification. He took Martin to be the Martin Funck who landed at Philadelphia on 3 November 1750 from the ship Brotherhood with a Hanns Funck, and a descendant’s tradition held that Martin had come over with his brother Hans.