♂John Gingerich

John Gingerich (born about 1720, died between 12 September 1818 and 25 October 1819) was a Pennsylvania German yeoman of Annville Township in the Lebanon Valley, whose will of 12 September 1818 divided a plantation of 145 acres on the Swatara Creek among six children and left his house to the two who still lived in it. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Anna Maria Gingerich (1767–1846).

Annville

The year of his birth is probably an estimate: no record states it, and the family record gives about 1720 (see Notes). The federal census of 1810 lists him in Annville Township, then part of Dauphin County. Lebanon County was formed in 1813 from parts of Dauphin and Lancaster, so Annville Township lay in Lebanon County by the time he made his will without anyone having moved. The land ran to the Swatara Creek and adjoined the lands of John Miller, Adam Barth and the estate of Thomas Clarck.

Family trees have given him a wife, Anna Hostetter, but no register or will states the marriage or her name (see Notes); the will names no wife. The will names six children: Christian, Michael, Leonard, Mary the wife of Laurence Kuns, Barbara the wife of Bearnhart Braun, and Elizabeth the wife of Jacob Ludwig. Christian had died in 1808, which is why his share was left to him “or to [his] Heirs and Assigns”. Mary is the Anna Maria Gingerich who married Lorentz Kuntz. The son Michael was named for his grandfather, who had died thirty-four years before the will.

The will

John Gingerich made his will on 12 September 1818, describing himself as a yeoman “at present well in body and of a sound and well mind memory and understanding”. He signed it with a mark. Leonard was to have the young mare. Elizabeth, the wife of Jacob Ludwig, was left £25, two young cows, her bed and bedstead, and all the linen cloth, yarn, flax, tow and rope. A granddaughter, Elizabeth, the daughter of his son Michael, was left a bed and bedstead, two spinning wheels and £35.

The plantation was to be sold at public auction and the money paid out in equal shares to the six children by age, the three eldest first and then the three youngest, “and so on as they succeed each other in age”. Sums already advanced to three of the children were to be deducted from their shares: £3 15s to Christian, £8 to Mary and £7 to Barbara. Until the land was sold, Leonard and Elizabeth were to keep possession of “my House Where I now Live” and to be furnished with “Bread, Meat and other Victuals” out of the estate. The will does not say why Elizabeth, a married woman, was living in her father’s house.

He named as executors his nephew John Gingerich, son of Peter, and Henry Heilman. The witnesses were Adam Heilman and John Miller, the same John Miller whose land adjoined the plantation. John Gingerich died between the signing and 25 October 1819, when the two witnesses swore to his signature before Andrew Shulze, Register for the Probate of Wills, and the will was proved in Lebanon County. No record of the exact date of his death has been found.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his daughter Anna Maria Gingerich (1767–1846) and her son John Kunz (1786–1865), and divide among John Kunz’s children: one through his son Samuel Kunz (1825–1904) and Samuel’s son Thomas Koons (1855–1938), the other through his son Jacob John Kunz (1814–1866) and Jacob’s daughter Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923). The lines meet again when Thomas Koons married Magdalena M. Koons on 24 December 1876 in Henry County, Indiana, both descendants of John Gingerich; their daughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977) was the mother of Ora Emogene Walrath. John Kunz’s will, dated 29 July 1864, names a son Jacob as one of his executors; that this Jacob is Jacob John Kunz rests on a family letter of 1916 and on the two men living in the same county.

Notes

The family record gives his birth as about 1720. No record states it, and it sits badly with what the records do show: it would make him about 98 when he signed his will “well in body”, and twenty-nine years older than his brother Peter, born in 1749. The records do not give his age, and no better birth year has been found. The Swiss birthplace rests on the same unrecorded entry.

Family trees have given him a wife, Anna Hostetter, but neither a register nor the will states a marriage. Those trees also gave her a birth in 1732 and a death on 10 January 1788; both dates belong to another woman, an Anna Hostettler buried at Wahlern in the Swiss canton of Bern that day, aged 56, the wife of Peter Mischler. The only Anna Hostetter on record among the Gingerichs of Annville was the wife of Christian Gingerich, as her mother Barbara Ebersole’s will of 11 December 1807 names her, so the name may have been copied up a generation. A compiled card file gives the mother of his son Christian as Magdalena, but no register or will names the mother of any of John’s children; a pencilled note on the same card gives Christian different parents altogether. The identity of John Gingerich’s wife is therefore unsettled.

Origins

The family record makes John Gingerich a son of Michael Gingrich, who, the family record gives, died in April 1785 at Lancaster, and a brother of Peter Gingerich (1749–1829) of East Hanover Township. No surviving record names his mother. His own will supports the tie to Peter: one of the two executors it names is “John Gingerich son of Peter Gingerich”, a nephew who shared his uncle’s name and had to be told apart from him. The family record also gives him a birth about 1720 at Steffisburg, in the Swiss canton of Bern, but no register or other record has been found that states either the date or the place (see Notes).