♂Jacob John Kunz

Jacob John Kunz (3 December 1814 – 31 August 1866) was a Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, tenant farmer who had ten children near Jonestown and in 1860 held no land of his own. He was the great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his daughter Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923) and her daughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977).

Early life

Jacob was born on 3 December 1814 at Hanover, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. No baptism has been found for him, and the date comes from compiled family trees; his age of 45 in the census of 1860 agrees with it. His name was written in many ways: Kunz, Kuns, Kuhns and, in his children’s generation, Koons. Two of his daughters’ death certificates name him as “J Jacob Kunz” and “Jacob Kuns”.

He was a son of John Kunz (1786–1865) of Lebanon County, who married Cattarina Gingerich (1793–1861) in 1811. John’s will, made on 29 July 1864 and signed “Johannes Kuntz”, appoints “three of my sons namely Jacob, John, and Lorentz, to be my executors”. A family letter written in 1916 also lists a “J. Jacob” among the couple’s nine children, married to Magdalena Holdeman. The will does not say which Jacob it means; the letter makes the link, and Jacob’s own choice of “my friend Joseph Gingrich” as an executor fits his mother’s family. The descent from John of Samuel Kunz, Jacob’s brother, rests on Pennsylvania church and census entries.

Marriage and family

On 23 May 1839, at Jonestown, he married Magdalene Holdeman (1821–1885), a daughter of Henry Holdeman and Magdalena Light. The 1916 family letter lists ten children, born between 1840 and 1861; two died as infants, Maria in 1841 and Moses in 1851.

The index to the 1850 census lists the family in Union Township, Lebanon County: Jacob Koons, 35, with his wife, indexed as “Molly”, 29, and four daughters, Catharine, 8, Amelia, 5, Juliana, 3, and Sarah, 1, the last three indexed as Emillia, Guliann and Sarah.

In the census of 1860 the family lived in Swatara Township, with a Jonestown post office. Jacob, recorded as “Kuhns”, was a tenant farmer with no real estate and personal property worth $1,000; seven of the children were at home, together with an eighteen-year-old servant, Samuel Miller. Samuel Kunz took a different course: he moved west to Henry County, Indiana, and by 1870 owned a farm there.

The two families came together again in the next generation. His daughter Magdalena married Samuel’s son Thomas Koons in Indiana in 1876, so that she never changed her surname. The couple would be first cousins, and John Kunz and Cattarina Gingerich would stand twice in the ancestry of their descendants.

Will and death

Jacob made his will on 14 August 1866 as “Jacob Koons of the Township of Union”, and signed it “Jacob Kuns”. The will describes him as weak in body. He left all his real and personal estate to his wife Magdalena for her life, and the estate was then to be divided equally among all his children. The furniture he had given his daughter Catharine “to commence house keeping with” was charged against her in his “family book”, and each of the other children was to receive the same amount. His wife was to be guardian of the children during their minority, and the executors were his wife and “my friend Joseph Gingrich”. The will was recorded at Lebanon County on 22 September 1866. Henry Light and Henry Bross witnessed it.

A Find a Grave memorial gives Jacob Kunz’s death as 31 August 1866 in Lebanon County, at the age of 51, five years after the birth of his youngest child, and places his burial at Jonestown; no death record or burial register entry is known. If that date is right, he died seventeen days after signing his will. Magdalene outlived him by nearly nineteen years. A Find a Grave memorial gives her death as 16 February 1885, and an online memorial entry places it at the Lebanon house of Henry and Amelia Umberger; Amelia was their daughter. The same memorial places her burial in the Zion Lutheran Cemetery at Jonestown.