♀Magdalena (surname unknown)

Magdalena (living in 1777) was the widow of Michael Shank, a landholder of Conestoga Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and is known from the deed of 10 February 1777 that settled his land, which calls her “Magdalena his Widow”. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through her probable daughter Magdalena Shank (1752–1837).

Her maiden name is not known, and no record of her parents, her birth or her death has been found. The deed gives her no surname of her own, and a typed card in a compilation of Lancaster County Mennonite records, which abstracts the same deed, leaves her surname blank. Her husband “lately died intestate”, and the deed names seven children as his 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”; it names her as his widow and the children as his issue, but does not say that she was the mother of any of them, and no other record has been found that does. Under the law his three Conestoga tracts, of 5¼, 110 and 17½ acres, descended to the children subject to “the Dower or Thirds of the said Magdalena the Widow … during the Term of her natural Life”, her right to a third of the land for as long as she lived. On 10 February 1777 she and the five children who were of age released their shares, and she her dower^W, to John Shank, one of the heirs, for £785 14s 3d. The deed names her first among the sellers, as “Magdalena Shank of the Township of Connestogoe … Widow”. It was not recorded until 1 August 1786, when a subscribing witness, Michael Shenk, affirmed before a justice of the county court that he had seen her seal and deliver it. Nothing is known of her after 1777. The same sentence of the deed that calls her “Magdalena his Widow” also names the heir Magdalena, wife of Peter Gingerick, and Magdalena’s husband Peter Gingerich had a mother named Magdalena as well, the wife of Michael Gingrich (1700–1785); the deed keeps widow and heir apart, and the widow and Peter’s mother were two different women.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her probable daughter Magdalena, who married Peter Gingerich (1749–1829), and her daughter Cattarina Gingerich (1793–1861), the wife of John Kunz (1786–1865). They divide between Cattarina’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) on 24 December 1876 in Henry County, Indiana. 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.