♂Johann Heinrich Kuntz

Johann Heinrich Kuntz (14 September 1718 – 22 April 1795) was a Lutheran born at Gleisweiler, in the Electoral Palatinate^W, whom the family record names as the father of Lorentz Kuntz (1752–1838), a settler of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. The family record makes him the fourth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Lorentz, a link that the records do not settle.

Early life

He was born on 14 September 1718 at Gleisweiler, a village now in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, and baptized there three days later, on 17 September, the son of Felix Kuntz and his wife Anna Maria. He was their youngest known child. His parents had brought their older children to the Lutheran church at Edenkoben, from 1700 onwards, before settling in neighboring Gleisweiler, where his brother Johann Jacob was baptized in 1716. His father was buried at Gleisweiler in February 1737, when Johann Heinrich was eighteen.

Later life

The records do not follow him beyond his baptism. He is said to have gone to Pennsylvania and to have died there on 22 April 1795, but no record of his crossing, his death, his burial or an estate is known.

Family

The family record makes him the father of Lorentz Kuntz, born on 14 April 1752 at Sebbeterode, in the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel^W. A son born in Hesse in 1752 sits uneasily with a father reported to have died in Pennsylvania, and the link between them is unsettled. No record of Johann Heinrich’s marriage is known, and no record names Lorentz’s mother. A wedding the family record once gave him, at Earl Town in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, on 25 June 1738, most likely belongs to another Johannes Kuntz, of Opequon in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Lines of descent

Both of his lines of descent to Ora Emogene Walrath run through his son Lorentz Kuntz and Lorentz’s son John Kunz (1786–1865), and divide in the generation after that, between John’s sons Samuel Kunz (1825–1904) and Jacob John Kunz (1814–1866). John Kunz’s own will, made in 1864, names Jacob among “three of my sons” appointed his executors. The lines meet again when Thomas Koons married Magdalena M. Koons on 24 December 1876 in Henry County, Indiana, both then being descendants of Johann Heinrich Kuntz. Thomas was Samuel’s son and Magdalena was Jacob’s daughter, and their daughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977) was Ora Emogene Walrath’s mother.

Notes

Lorentz’s parentage

No baptism of Lorentz is known in Pennsylvania or in Hesse, and the printed register of the Lutheran pastor John Caspar Stoever Jr., 1730 to 1779, baptizes no child of a Johannes Kuntz and an Anna Elizabetha Catharina at Earl Town or anywhere else in Lancaster County. The family record’s statement that Lorentz’s mother died in Hesse in 1785 rests on no source. A shared online tree gives Lorentz other parents, a Johannes Kuntz and an Anna Elisabeth Erckmann who married in Hesse in 1744, with no sources and with children dated before that marriage.

The 1738 wedding

The family record gave him a wife, Anna Elizabetha Catherine Stoever. The pastor’s own book enters the wedding as that of “Johannes Küntz und Anna Elisabetha Catharina”, with Earl Town, the township of New Holland, in his column for places; a Pennsylvania marriage index gives “Conewago” only as an indexing tag on the volume. The bridegroom is never called Johann Heinrich, and the same book shows a John Cuntz at Opequon with a son born on 26 March 1739, nine months after the wedding, and a wife named in 1740 as Anna Elisabetha Catharina. He is probably the Johannes Cuntze of Augusta County, Virginia, often confused with Johann Heinrich, who was born in 1706 in Westphalia to a different father; his grave memorial lists two Stoever wives and a son John (1739–1832). A second “John Kuntz and his wife”, sponsors at Conewago on 30 November 1738, cannot be placed.

Men of the same name

Another Johannes Kuntz was born on 3 January 1718, the son of a Johann Michael Kuntz, in a German parish not yet identified. A Johann Henrich Kuntz signed the lists of the ship Two Brothers, from Rotterdam, on 13 October 1747, with no age or birthplace; nothing ties him, or any other man of the name in Pennsylvania, to the Gleisweiler child.