♀Magdalena Light

Magdalena Light (27 February 1796 – 2 June 1868) was a Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, woman who was left a widow at twenty-eight with six young children and then married the widower of her own sister, becoming stepmother to the children of that sister. She was the great-great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her daughter Magdalene Holdeman (1821–1885), her granddaughter Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923) and her great-granddaughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977).

Early life

Magdalena was born on 27 February 1796 in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, in the part of it that became Lebanon County in 1813. She was a daughter of Henry Light, a landholder of Swatara Township who died in 1830, and one of a large family: the papers that settled his estate name more than a dozen of her brothers and sisters. Her sister Elizabeth, the wife of Martin Wenger, had eight children with him and was dead by 1831; a published family compilation dates her death to October 1823.

First marriage

Magdalena married Henry Holdeman (1792–1824), whose family name was also written Haldeman. A lineage book of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which rests on an applicant’s compiled descent, gives the year as 1814. The census of 1820 found Henry Holdeman’s household in Bethel Township. They had six children, Elizabeth, Catharine, Thomas, Mary, Magdalene and Henry, the youngest born in April 1823. When Thomas was buried in March 1876, the Lutheran register of the Jonestown area named him as the son of Henry Haldeman and his wife Magdalena (Lichte), the German spelling of Light. Henry Holdeman died on 27 September 1824, without a will. In 1825 the Orphans’ Court heard that he had left six children, all under twenty-one, and that his personal estate would not pay his debts, and it ordered his lot in Swatara Township, with its house and stable, to be sold. The administrator of the estate was a Samuel Light, which was also the name of one of her brothers.

Second marriage

Between the autumn of 1824 and 1829 Magdalena married Martin Wenger (1780–1860), probably of Union Township, the widower of her sister Elizabeth. Her new stepchildren were also her nephews and nieces, and in 1831 two of the boys, Martin and Henry, were still under fourteen. No record of the marriage itself is known. Its place in the family is shown by the county deed books: in a release of 1833 on the estate of her brother Samuel Light, “Martin Wenger intermarried with Magdalena, late Magdalena Light” stands among Samuel’s brothers and sisters, beside the children of “Elizabeth, late Elizabeth Light”, the first wife of the same Martin Wenger. Their son Benjamin Wenger was born about 1829 in East Hanover Township, and lived until 1910. His marriage record of 1902 names his parents as Martin and Magdalena Wenger.

A compiled Ensminger family history names a daughter of this marriage, Sarah Wenger, born 2 October 1832 in Lebanon County, who married Henry D. Ensminger and died on 20 December 1869 in Lancaster County.

On 29 November 1831 Magdalena and Martin Wenger joined her brothers and sisters in signing a release to the executors of her father’s will. The deed describes the signers as the “children and legatees named in the last will and testament of Henry Light late of Swatara Township” and calls him “our father”. Each of the nine shares came to $821.22. She signed it herself, as Magdalena Wenger.

Later life and death

The censuses of 1850 and 1860 found Magdalena and Martin Wenger in Union Township, Lebanon County. Martin died in 1860. Magdalena died on 2 June 1868 at Jonestown, aged 72, and was buried in the Wenger Meeting House Cemetery there.

Notes

Her dates of birth and death come from grave memorials and a compiled list of her father’s children; no baptism or death record of her is known. The same memorials name her mother as Magdalena Funck (1764–1841), and her mother was probably that woman. Her grandfather Martin Funk (1732–1796), whose 1797 will spells the name Founk, left a legacy to a daughter “Magdelena now the wife of Henry Light the younger”; that the Henry Light of the will was her father is probable rather than proved. Henry Light’s own will names only a wife Magdalena, living on 21 May 1830; it does not name this Magdalena or say that she was the mother of his daughters, and the county held more than one Henry Light. The memorials’ family links are compiled rather than recorded, and DNA from the family’s tests lands on the expected maternal side, which fits the link without proving it. Sarah Wenger is known only from that compiled Ensminger history; no record of her birth, marriage or death is known. The family record also carries a marriage to Henry Holdeman in 1810, when she would have been fourteen; the lineage book and a grave memorial give 1814, and the earliest of the children with a known birth year was born in 1817. No record of either marriage date is known.

Martin Wenger’s township

The censuses of 1850 and 1860 place her and Martin Wenger in Union Township, Lebanon County. No record gives the township of the marriage itself.