♀Magdalene Holdeman

Magdalene Holdeman (11 March 1821 – 16 February 1885) was a farm wife of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, who raised ten children in Lebanon County. She was the great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her daughter Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923) and granddaughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977).

Early life

Magdalene was born on 11 March 1821 in Lebanon County, the daughter of Henry Holdeman (1792–1824) and Magdalena Light (1796–1868). The family’s name was written Holdeman, Haldeman and Holderman, often in the same year. Her father died on 27 September 1824, when she was three. In August 1825 the county Orphans’ Court heard a petition from Samuel Light, the administrator of the estate, who reported that Henry had died without a will and left six children, all under twenty-one: Elizabeth, Catharine, Thomas, Mary, Magdalena and Henry. The personal estate would not cover his debts, so the court ordered the family’s seventeen-acre lot in Swatara Township, with its one-story house and stable, to be sold at public auction to pay them and to support the children. Her mother later married Martin Wenger, a widower of Union Township, and was his widow for the last eight years of her life, after his death in 1860.

No record of Magdalene’s baptism has been found. The registers of the three nearest congregations, Zion Lutheran at Jonestown, Sattazahn’s in Union Township and St. John’s at Fredericksburg, contain no entry for her in 1821.

Marriage and family

On 23 May 1839 she married Jacob John Kunz (1814–1866) at Jonestown. The Zion Lutheran register enters the bride as “Maria Haldeman”. She had a sister, Mary, and the same register records a second “Maria Haldeman” marrying Jacob Schucker in 1837, so the entry alone does not show which sister it was; her gravestone, as transcribed on Find a Grave for Magdalena Haldeman Kuns, and her daughters’ records tie this marriage to her. The couple were living in Union Township in 1850; in 1860 they were in Swatara Township, where the census lists Jacob as a tenant farmer who owned no land. They had ten children, born between 1840 and 1861. The line later folded back on itself: their daughter Magdalena married Thomas Koons, a son of Samuel Kunz. Jacob was a son of John Kunz, whose will of 1864 names him among the sons appointed executors, and so Samuel’s brother; the couple would be first cousins, and the Kunz grandparents would stand twice in the family’s ancestry.

A Find a Grave memorial gives Jacob’s death as 1866, and in 1870 Magdalene was keeping house in Union Township. A Find a Grave memorial gives her death as 16 February 1885, at the house of her daughter Amelia and son-in-law Henry Umberger, near Lebanon. The same memorial places her burial in the Zion Lutheran Cemetery at Jonestown, with the grave marked as that of Magdalena Haldeman Kuns. The date of burial is not known. About three weeks after her death, letters of administration on her estate were granted to her son Joseph Koons (1857–1937).

Notes

The Lebanon Daily News of 11 March 1885 reported the grant of letters of administration under the register’s office, on the estate of “Magdalena Koons, deceased, Union township”, to “Joseph H. Koons”; the name used here is Joseph Koons. The notice gives her township as Union, while the memorial entry places her death at the Umberger house in Lebanon; the records do not explain the difference.

Two of her daughters’ death certificates, from 1919 and 1943, name their mother’s maiden name as Haldeman and Holdeman. The later one, supplied by a grandson, gives her first name as Elizabeth, which is an error in that record, not a second wife.