♀Judith Wenger

Judith Wenger (19 January 1732 – 4 March 1812) was a woman of Lebanon Township, Pennsylvania, the mother of seven children by the farmer Martin Funk, who named her one of the two executors of his will; she outlived him by fifteen years. She was probably the fourth great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her daughter Magdalena Funk (1764–1841).

Family

Judith was most likely a daughter of Hans Wenger of Bethel Township, then in Lancaster County, who is said to have been born in the canton of Bern about 1705. He took the oaths at Philadelphia on 16 September 1748, off the ship Patience from Rotterdam, with his sons Stephen, Christian and John, and settled near Jonestown. Judith, then sixteen, is believed to have made the crossing with them.

She married Martin Funk of Lebanon Township. Martin and Judith had seven children: a son, Martin, and six daughters, Ann, Barbara, Magdalena, Christiana, Mary and Elizabeth. In 1775 Martin was one of the two executors of the will of Judith’s unmarried sister Maria, written in German; the other was her brother John. Maria is said to have left her clothes and belongings to her nieces, five of them Judith’s daughters.

Widowhood

Her husband’s will, which calls her Jude, named her one of his two executors, with his friend Isaac Sheaffer, and is said to have left her a third of the estate, the share the law gave a widow; the home place went to their son Martin. Martin died on 19 December 1796, and the will was proved on 9 January 1797.

Judith lived another fifteen years and died on 4 March 1812. By the family’s account she was buried beside Martin in the graveyard on their farm, under a stone inscribed in German that names her “Judie Funckin”, the feminine form of Funck. In 1901, after the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company had bought part of the farm and the smoke and fumes of its steel works had begun to kill the grass and wear the lettering from the stones, the burial ground was sold to the company and the graves were moved to Ebenezer Cemetery near Lebanon. Her grave is said to be in Section H of that cemetery, which is now called Covenant Greenwood.

Notes

Her parents

No record names Judith as Hans Wenger’s daughter. His will, made on 15 September 1771 as “John Wingert of Bethel Township” and signed “Hans Wenger”, names his sons Christian, John and Stephen and his daughter Maria, and leaves the rest of his estate “amongst all my Children”; it does not name Judith. The link rests on her sister Maria’s will of April 1775. Because it was “written in High Dutch”, it could not be copied into the will book, but when it was proved on 6 May 1775 letters went to “Martin Funck and John Wengert the Executors”: Judith’s husband beside the son who had been executor of Hans Wenger’s own will. Edward Bowman Espenshade’s My American Ancestors and Their Descendants (1950), working from an abstract of the German will, reads its gifts of clothing as going to Maria’s nieces, among them Magdalena, Ann, Christiana, Mary and Elizabeth Funck, daughters of Martin Funck and Judith Wenger. Her mother’s name is not known.

Her name and dates

Her husband’s will calls her only “Jude”. The maiden name Wenger and her dates come from the Mennonite family card filed under her husband, which calls her a daughter of “Hans- Sherrick (?)”. The name Sherrick most likely comes from Caspar Sherick, from whom Hans Wenger had the land near Jonestown in 1749, rather than from a mother. Her gravestone, as the same history translates it, gives the same dates, but her age as 79 years, 1 month and 14 days, a year short of what the dates make it. The ship list of 1748 names only the men of the family; that Judith came with them, and that the children were born at Zweibrücken before the family sailed, is the family history’s belief.

Her burial

The burial place rests on compiled sources: a Find a Grave memorial, which places her in Section H of Covenant Greenwood (formerly Ebenezer) Cemetery, and Espenshade’s My American Ancestors and Their Descendants (1950, p. 299), which describes the graves as moved from the family graveyard on the Funck farm. The memorial gives the move as 1898, for the Bethlehem Steel plant. Espenshade gives 1901: he quotes the deed, dated “4-11-1901”, by which the trustee of the Funck heirs sold the burial ground to the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company under an order of the Orphans’ Court of Lebanon County. Shenk’s A History of the Lebanon Valley in Pennsylvania (1930) records that the company’s Lebanon interests were later merged with those of the Bethlehem Steel company, so the two accounts name the same works; their dates, 1898 and 1901, are not reconciled.