♀Malinda Koons

Malinda Koons (1858 – 2 June 1925) was a Pennsylvania-born farm wife of Henry County, Indiana, and Clay County, Illinois, who married a man of her own surname, John H. W. Koons, and later, as a widow of fifty-four, married again. She was the younger sister of Thomas Koons (1855–1938), the grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014).

Early life

She was born in Pennsylvania; a christening index gives her, as “Melinde Kunz”, christened in 1858 at Jonestown, Lebanon County. She was the second and last child of Samuel Kunz (1825–1904), who used the name Koons, and Mary Elizabeth Rickert (1831–1909). Her own records disagree on the year: her death record gives 25 April 1857 and the 1900 census April 1859. By 1860 the family had moved to Greensboro Township, Henry County, Indiana, where she was living with her parents and brother in the census of 1870.

First marriage

On 3 June 1876, in Henry County, she married John H. Koontz, spelled Koons in the censuses. He was born in Pennsylvania about 1855; by name, age and birthplace he was very probably John H. W. Koons, a son of Jacob John Kunz, the Lebanon County farmer whom a family letter of 1916 names as her father’s elder brother, although no record yet gives the parents of Malinda’s husband. If so, Malinda and her brother Thomas each married a child of the same uncle.

In 1880 the couple were farming at Greensboro with their first two children, and by 1900 they had followed her parents to Harter Township, Clay County, Illinois, where the census recorded seven children, from Samuel, aged 22, to Reuben, aged 2. Her father’s will of 1894 left her forty acres of Clay County land. John died between 1900 and 1910; in 1910 Malinda was a widow of fifty-one, heading her own household in Harter Township with her three youngest children, and told the census taker that she had borne eight children, six of them then living.

Second marriage and death

On 1 February 1912, at fifty-four, she married Milton E. Jones in Richland County, Illinois; the marriage record names her parents as Samuel Koons and a Rickert. A 1920 census index lists the couple in Harter Township, with a “Rubin Jones” who is taken here to be her son Reuben. The Illinois deaths index gives Malinda Jones as dying at Flora, Clay County, on 2 June 1925, and as buried the next day.