♂Hans Funk

Hans Funk (died 5 September 1734) was a farmer at Reihen, a village near Sinsheim in the Kraichgau, in Baden, and a preacher of the Mennonite congregation on the Streichenberg estate. He was probably the sixth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his son Hans Funk (died 1752).

Preacher at Reihen

Mennonite preachers were laymen chosen from their own congregations, and he worked the land like the families he served. Mennonites in the region lived on sufferance: they paid their rulers high sums for protection, and they were fined because they would not marry in the state churches but had their marriages blessed by their own preachers, men such as Hans. Only one child of his is known, his son Hans, who bought a farm of his own at Reihen on 12 May 1725. The elder Hans is said to have been seventy-three when he died at Reihen on 5 September 1734.

Notes

How his life is known

Hans Funk is known only from letters written in 1947 and 1948 by a Funk family of Waghäusel, in Baden, descended from his grandson Heinrich, and printed in translation in Edward Bowman Espenshade’s My American Ancestors and Their Descendants (1950). The writer had little to go on: “I only know of him that he died in Richen on September 5, 1734 at the age of 73”, Richen being the letters’ spelling of Reihen. The same letters name the younger Hans as his son and add that the writer knew of no other children. The age at death puts his birth about 1661. Mennonites did not baptize infants, so no record of his birth is to be expected. The writer supposed that he “must have been a son of the refugee Heinrich Funk”, a Swiss Mennonite who had settled in the district of Hilsbach; that is a guess, and no parents are given for him here.

The Hans Funk of 1731

Espenshade took him to be the Hans Funk who appears in 1731 as a member of the Mennonite congregation at Streichenberg, one of “those Swiss who earlier came from Berne or Zurich”, in the words of a committee of the Lancaster County Historical Society that Espenshade quotes. The same report found “another Hans Funk, a deacon” at Reihen, and so treats them as two men. Which of the two, if either, was the preacher who died in 1734 is not known.