♂John Holdeman

John Holdeman (died about 7 December 1819) was a landholder of Bethel Township, in the part of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, that later became Dauphin and then Lebanon County, and the father of eleven children. He was the third great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his son Henry Holdeman (1792–1824).

Marriage and land

By June 1772 he was married to Elizabeth Stetler, a daughter of Abraham Stetler of Bethel Township. That month the Lancaster County Orphans’ Court divided her late father’s estate and paid a share to “John Haldiman and Elizabeth his wife”. The couple settled on the Stetler land, a tract in Bethel called “Reading” that her father’s heirs held in common. John then spent more than thirty years buying out his wife’s brothers and sisters, by indentures of 1783 and 1794, until in 1814 and 1816 he paid Peter and Catharine Neakommet £125 for the last eighth of its 226½ acres. Between 1789 and 1793 he and Elizabeth sold 111¼ acres to Joseph Bicksler for £340, keeping the use of the water for John.

Tax lists find him in Bethel from 1773 to 1789, and he is said to have served as a private in 1782 in Captain Casper Steover’s company of the 2nd Battalion, Lancaster County militia. In February 1814 he sold his unmarried daughter Catharine a lot of nearly three acres out of his plantation, with houses, barns, stables, gardens and orchards, for £29 12s 6d. The deed traced his title through “John Holdeman and Elizabeth his wife in right of the said Elizabeth”, the form for land a wife held by inheritance. He signed it and the receipt in his own hand, while the Neakommets put their marks to their release of 1816.

Death and family

He died intestate in Bethel Township on or about 7 December 1819, and seventeen days later letters of administration^W were granted to his sons John and Henry. In January 1820 the eldest son, John, petitioned the Orphans’ Court, naming the eleven children, all over twenty-one: sons John, Abraham and Henry, and eight daughters, seven of them married. It probably named no widow; Elizabeth seems to have died before him. The remaining land, about 112 acres, was to be valued for division, but on 25 September 1820 the heirs in court refused it at the valuation and asked for a sale, which John and Henry were appointed to make, each bound in $8,422.74.

Notes

The land

A published genealogy, Genealogies of Pennsylvania Families from the Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine, states that John bought the 226-acre “Reading” tract from his wife’s father’s heirs on 27 January 1774. The 1814 deed to Catharine, which recites the title, gives the purchases instead as indentures of 7 April 1783 and 27 January 1794. The two dates share a day and month, so the printed 1774 may be a slip for 1794, but the records do not settle it. The sale to Joseph Bicksler is known only from a transcription of Dauphin County deeds of 1789–1793, which shows the Stetler heirs releasing their shares to John and the couple selling 111¼ acres out of 276½. The 112 acres left at his death would fit 226½ acres less the Bicksler sale and Catharine’s lot, so the figure 276½ looks like a copying error.

Residence and service

The tax lists spell his name Holteman, Holdman and Holdeman. The 1790 census, in a transcription, lists a John Holdiman in Dauphin County heading a household of eight, possibly his. His militia service comes from a lineage book of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which also has him dying in Bethel Township in 1819; it rests on the society’s compilation alone.

His death

The day comes from the January 1820 petition, which says he died “on or about the seventh day of December last”; a printed family history gives the same day. The Lebanon County estate index prints 24 December 1819 in both its death and its letters column; that is the day letters of administration were granted.

His wife

Several lineage compilations, the DAR lineage book among them, name John’s wife as Maria. The 1772 court record names her Elizabeth, as does the 1814 deed, and the 1804 church record of their daughter Maria’s marriage names the bride’s parents as Holderman and “Elizabeth Staetller”, the one record known that names Elizabeth as the mother of any of the children. It may be that the name Maria came down from the wife of Hannes Holdeman (below). The published genealogy says that Elizabeth died before her husband, and the January 1820 petition appears to say that he left no widow, though the word is hard to read. No record of her death is known.

His birth and parents

No record gives his birth. An application to the Sons of the American Revolution gives February 1750, and the card file of the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society about 1745; both are compilations.

His parents are not known from any record. The published genealogy suggests he was “presumably” a son of Hannes Holdeman of Warwick Township, Lancaster County, who was alive on 10 December 1773 and whose inventory was filed on 9 January 1774, leaving a widow, Anna Maria. Deeds show that a John Holdeman of Bethel and his wife Maria sold their Bethel farm in May 1772, and that a “Hannes Holdeman Senr” and his wife Maria bought land in Warwick a few weeks later and sold it in 1773 to “his son Jacob”. The Mennonite card file makes the same link, naming Johannes Haldeman of Warwick (about 1720–1773) and Anna Maria as John’s parents and Elizabeth Stettler as his wife, but it cites no source.

No known record names John of Bethel as Hannes’s son: the Lancaster County will abstracts name no Haldeman of Warwick or Bethel, and the papers of the 1774 administration of Hannes’s estate, which might settle it, are still to be consulted. Online family trees call the couple Johannes Holderman and Anna Marie Kreider; nothing cited supports the surname Kreider, and the DNA matches those trees attach to the couple all descend through John himself, so they cannot test the link.