♂Johann Friedrich Rickert

Johann Friedrich Rickert (born 20 October 1803) was a German-born emigrant who settled among the Pennsylvania Germans of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, and later moved west to Henry County, Indiana. He was the great-great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his daughter Mary Elizabeth Rickert (1831–1909), her son Thomas Koons (1855–1938) and Thomas’s daughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977).

Early life

Kaukehmen lay in Kreis Niederung, in the part of East Prussia known as Prussian Lithuania^W, where much of the rural population spoke Lithuanian. The town was renamed Kuckerneese in 1938 and, since 1945, has been Yasnoye in the Kaliningrad region of Russia. The Kaukehmen parish register of those years was kept in Lithuanian, under German column headings. A baptism entry in it records a Johann Friedrich born on 20 October 1803 and baptized four days later, on 24 October; the index gives the surname as Kiechert, a likely misreading of Rickert in a hand written by a Lithuanian-speaking clerk. The entry names the parents as Carl and Florentina. That this entry is his rests on the matching date and district alone; the same date stands on an online family tree, so it is not independent of that tree. The index of the register gives the mother’s name as “Deglingin”, the feminine form of Degling.

The records do not show when he left Prussia or when he crossed to America.

Pennsylvania

An index to the register of Zion German Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, Dauphin, Pennsylvania, records the marriage of Johann Friedrich Rickert and Rebecca Shenk on 4 March 1830. The 1830 census found him at Annville, Lebanon County, in a household of a man and a woman in their twenties, with no children.

By January 1831 he was in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, married to Rebecca Shenk (1805–before 1880), a Pennsylvania-born woman. Their eldest child, Maria, later Mary Elizabeth, was born at Millerstown, the older name of Annville, on 23 January 1831, and was christened at Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran Church there. Her printed German baptismal certificate names her parents themselves as her sponsors. By 1836 the family was in the Jonestown area, where Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church baptized three more children: Karalina in 1836, Sophia in 1838 and Reuben in 1842, all recorded with the parents “Friedrich Rickert, Rebecca”. The couple had four children, christened between 1831 and 1842.

The census of 1840 found the couple, now in their thirties and with three daughters under ten, in East Hanover Township, Lebanon County. The census of 1850, as indexed, found the household in East Hanover Township, Lebanon County, with him listed as Fredrick Rickerd, aged 47 and born in Germany, together with Rebecca and all four children.

Indiana

The censuses of 1860, 1870 and 1880, as indexed, place him at Greensboro Township, Henry County, Indiana, written Frederick Ricard, Rickert and Rickard. His daughter Mary Elizabeth and her husband, Samuel Kunz, were living in the same township by 1860, and his son Reuben died there in 1915. His daughter Sophia, widowed under the name Newton, remarried in Indiana in 1905 to Joseph Shultz; that marriage record names her parents as John Rickert and Rebecca Shank.

No record of his death has been found.

Notes

Reuben’s 1915 death certificate, on information from his widow, gives his father as “Fredrick Rickard”, born in Pennsylvania. The 1850 census, taken of the man himself, gives Germany, and the German birth stands. The same certificate gives Reuben’s birth as 31 August 1843, where his christening and the 1850 census place it about 1841.

An online family tree gives his birthplace as Sköpen, Niederung. His own baptism entry names the parish of Kaukehmen, and what its place column adds is not known. The baptism entry of his sister Johanne Sophia, born on 30 December 1804, places the family at Lang Sköpen, so the village is plausible, but no record yet shows it for his own birth. The same tree gives his parents as Carl Riechert and Florentine Degling, married about 1800, with four children born between 1801 and 1813. That account is compiled, not drawn from a record, and cannot stand as written: it gives Florentine a birth year of 1788, which would make her about twelve at the marriage. For his own entry the surname Degling rests on that index, which may not be independent of the online tree; the entry’s own text is not known. The entries for his sister’s baptism in 1805 and his brother Wilhelm Gustav’s in 1813 give the mother as Florentina, born Deglingin.