♀Madlena Neuenschwander

Madlena Neuenschwander was a woman of Eggiwil, in the Emmental in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, whose daughter Catharina, by her husband Hans Stauffer, was christened there on 10 September 1648, less than three months after the parish began to keep a register of baptisms. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Anna Stauffer (born about 1644).

Eggiwil

Hans Stauffer and Madlena Neuenschwander appear together in the first Eggiwil register: on 10 September 1648 their daughter Catharina was christened there, with Barbara Galli and Catharina Salzman among her godparents. The register writes the parents Hans Stouffer and Madlena Neuwenschwander. When and where they married, and when either of them was born or died, is not known.

Her husband was probably a son of the Anabaptist^W preacher Christian Stauffer, who was imprisoned at Thun in 1644. Hans and Madlena are said to have had two more children: Anna, who married Michael Schenk at Eggiwil on 21 September 1660 and went with him into exile in 1671, and a son Hans, who left the Palatinate^W for Pennsylvania in November 1709.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Anna and Anna’s son Christen, christened at Eggiwil on 15 June 1662, who was most likely the Christian Shank (died 1724) of Pennsylvania. They divide in the nineteenth century between Cattarina Gingerich’s sons Samuel Kunz (1825–1904) and Jacob John Kunz (1814–1866), and meet again when Samuel’s son Thomas Koons (1855–1938) married Jacob’s daughter Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923). Their daughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977) was the mother of Ora Emogene Walrath.

Notes

The 1648 christening

Catharina’s christening is the last entry on the first page of the Eggiwil baptism register, which was begun on 20 June 1648. It is the only entry that names Hans and Madlena as a couple. An online index of the register gives the child’s name as Hans, her father’s name, but the register itself reads “Infans: Catharina”.

What rests on a family history

That Hans and Madlena were the parents of Anna, who married Michael Schenk, comes from Richard W. Davis, “Four Generations of the Descendants of Michael Schenk and Anna Stauffer”, Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage (January 1994), as do the preacher, the son Hans and Anna’s exile. Davis cites the Eggiwil church register for Anna’s parents. Anna was born about 1643 or 1644, before the Eggiwil register begins, so no surviving entry names her parents; the 1648 christening shows a Hans Stauffer and a Madlena Neuenschwander raising a family at Eggiwil four years later.

Her husband’s father

Davis calls the preacher Christian Stauffer Anna’s grandfather without saying on which side. Madlena’s own father would have been a Neuenschwander, so a grandfather named Stauffer points to her husband’s father.