♀Magdalena Shank

Magdalena Shank (1752 – 1837) was a Pennsylvania German woman of Conestoga Township, Lancaster County, the wife of Peter Gingerich of East Hanover Township, whose father’s heirs named her in a deed of 1777 as “Magdalena the Wife of Peter Gingerick”. She was the third great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through her probable daughter Cattarina Gingerich (1793–1861).

Early life

The family record places her birth in 1752 at Conestoga, where her father, Michael Shank, held land; her mother was presumably his wife Magdalena, who outlived him. Her grandfather, Michael Shank the elder, gave her father 110 acres in the “Township of Connestogee” by a deed of 29 September 1757, and died in 1759, leaving a will that names her father among his eight children. Men named Michael Shank are said to have been on the Conestoga assessment of 1718 and the naturalization list of 1729; if they were her forebears, the family was among the township’s Swiss and German settlers a generation before her birth.

Her father died intestate, and on 10 February 1777 his widow and children settled his land by a deed naming seven heirs: Michael, Mary the wife of Abraham Brenneman, John, Elizabeth the wife of Daniel Hersey, “Magdalena the Wife of Peter Gingerick”, Freana, and Henry, “yet a minor under the age of twenty one years”. The widow and the heirs of age released their shares in his three Conestoga tracts, of 5¼, 110 and 17½ acres, and the widow her dower^W, to John for £785 14s 3d.

Marriage and family

She was already married to Peter Gingerich (1749–1829), a son of Michael Gingrich, when the deed was drawn: it lists “Peter Gingerick of Hannover Township … and Magdalena his Wife” among the parties. The family record gives 1777 as the year of the marriage, and their eldest son, Henry, is reckoned to have been born on 13 March 1777, a month after the deed. Peter farmed on the Swatara Creek in East Hanover Township, in what was Dauphin County until Lebanon County was formed in 1813. His estate was shared in 1835 among ten children, Henry, Elizabeth, Anna Mary, Christian, Catharine, Magdalena, Jacob, Michael, John and Peter; Catharine, the wife of John Kuntz, was in all likelihood Cattarina Gingerich, who had married John Kunz in 1811. The settlement does not name their mother.

Death

The family record gives her death as 1837 at Lebanon. A Magdalena Gingrich of East Hanover Township died before 29 June 1837, evidently without a will, for on that day letters of administration^W on her estate went to Michael Seltzer, the husband of Peter’s daughter Elizabeth, and to a Peter Gingrich, probably Peter’s son. She may well be the “Widow Gingrich” whose household stood next to a Peter Gingrich’s in Hanover Township in the census of 1830, the year after Peter’s death.

Whether that widow was Magdalena Shank is an open question. Peter’s will of 23 December 1823 says his wife Magdalena held money “which she got from the Estate of her late husband Abraham Steiner”, and in August 1806 a Lancaster County Orphans’ Court entry shows “Magdalena Gingrick (late Magdalena Steiner)” and a John Gingrick administering the estate of Abraham Steiner of Rapho Township. Magdalena Shank, Peter’s wife from 1777, cannot have been that widow. If Peter’s wife of 1823 was, then Magdalena Shank had died before 1823, Peter had married again, and the death of 1837 belongs to his second wife. None of this touches the descent: Cattarina was born in 1793, while Abraham Steiner was still living, and Magdalena Shank is the only wife of Peter’s known at that date.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through Cattarina Gingerich (1793–1861) and her husband John Kunz (1786–1865), and divide among their children: one through their son Samuel Kunz (1825–1904) and his son Thomas Koons (1855–1938), the other through their son Jacob John Kunz (1814–1866) and his 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 Magdalena Shank; 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

Birth, marriage and parents

No record of her birth or of her marriage has been found; the year and place of her birth and the year of the marriage come from the family record. A typed family card for Peter Gingerich, from a compilation of Lancaster County Mennonite records, names his wife as Magdalena Shenk and gives Henry’s birth as 13 March 1777. Her mother is not named in any record: the 1777 deed calls Michael Shank’s widow only “Magdalena his Widow” and does not say she was the mother of his children, so that she was Magdalena Shank’s mother is likely but not shown, and her maiden name is not known.

No record names Cattarina’s mother either. Cattarina is placed in the family by the 1835 settlement, which gives a “Catharine Kuntz” an equal share, and by the family record; Magdalena Shank is the only wife of Peter’s known in 1793.

The deed of 1777

The deed of 10 February 1777 was not proved, by a witness’s affirmation, and recorded at Lancaster until 1786. It writes the name Shank, Shenk and Shenck, sometimes in consecutive lines. A typed card in the same compilation of Mennonite records, citing the deed, lists the same children and gives her as the wife of Peter Gingerich. It gives her brother Henry the dates 1 January 1758 to 10 October 1836; a family history published in 1994 gives 26 December 1758 to 19 October 1836, and either fits a man still under twenty-one in February 1777. The men named Michael Shank on the 1718 assessment and the 1729 naturalization list come from a typed card citing a compilation of early settlers’ records published in 1917; the card does not show whether either was of her family.

The death of 1837 and the Steiner widow

The Lebanon County estate index lists the 1837 administration of Magdalena Gingrich of East Hanover, with letters granted on 29 June 1837 to Michael Seltzer and Peter Gingrich, and an account filed on 19 December 1839. The index does not call her a widow or name her heirs; the account of 1839 may name them. The 1830 census entry gives no name for the “Widow Gingrich”.

The 1806 entry names the Steiner widow’s fellow administrator as John Gingrick. That may mean she had married a John Gingrich, in which case she could have become Peter’s wife only after a second widowhood; the records do not say. A will of a Magdalena Gingrich recorded at Lebanon in 1843 is not hers: that woman describes herself as a spinster. An online family tree makes Magdalena Shank the widow of Abraham Steiner before she married Peter; the dates rule that out, since she was Peter’s wife by 1777 and Abraham Steiner was living until about 1806.

Another Magdalena

An online family tree gives her birth as 19 July 1753. That date belongs to a Maria Magdalena Schanck baptized in Germany, the daughter of a Johann Friedrich Schanck, and a different woman.