♀Maria (surname unknown)

Maria married Johannes Light, a settler of Lebanon Township, in what was then Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and was the mother of the six children who divided his land after his death in 1759. She was probably the fifth great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her son Henry Light (1738–1806).

Life

In December 1738 Johannes bought 274 acres on a branch of the Quittapahilla Creek, and in 1742 he is said to have built a large stone house on the land, where the Mennonites of the neighborhood met each month for worship. Maria and Johannes had six children: Martin, John, Henry, Barbara, Anna and Jacob. Her first name survives on a single gravestone in the family’s burial plot on the farm, which calls a Johannes Licht who died in 1798 “ein Sohn des Johannes und Maria Licht”, a son of Johannes and Maria Licht. She is said to have been born a Kreider.

Johannes died without a will in 1759. On 19 November that year the six children, all of full age, divided the land between them by deed, and the others sold Henry 155 acres and 47 perches of it. No widow is named in the deeds, so Maria had most likely died before her husband.

Notes

Her name

The name Maria rests on a red sandstone in the Light family burial plot, which lay on the eastern part of the land Johannes bought in 1738. Its inscription is printed in facsimile in P. C. Croll’s Ancient and Historic Landmarks in the Lebanon Valley (1895): “Hier Ruhet Johannes Licht, ist gebohren den 6 december 1720. Er ist ein Sohn des Johannes und Maria Licht, ist gestorben 6ten abril 1798.” Because the plot is on Johannes’s own farm, the Johannes and Maria of the stone are taken to be this couple. The man buried under it is not the John who shared in the division of 1759: that John lies in the same plot under a stone giving his birth as 21 February 1726 and his wife as Anna. Croll thought the man born in 1720 “must have been a brother of same name or, possibly a cousin”, and no other Light is listed beside Johannes among the men of the ship he is thought to have arrived on in 1738. Moses Light’s The Light Genealogy in America (1896) says that the name of John Light’s wife was not known.

The name Kreider

A Mennonite family card for Henry Light (1738–1806) names his parents as “Bishop John-Maria Kreider”. No record of her lifetime gives her maiden name. Other family trees make her Maria Kreider, born in 1707 and died on 12 November 1758; a birth year of 1707 does not fit the mother of the Johannes born in 1720.

Her death

The two deeds of 19 November 1759 recite that Johannes died intestate and that his six children became entitled to “the real estate of their said father”. No widow joins in either deed or is named in it, which is why she is taken to have died before him. No record gives the date.

Her son Henry

Henry Light is one of the six children named in the deeds of 1759. That he was Maria’s son, and not the child of another wife, rests on the gravestone that names her as Johannes’s wife and on the Mennonite family card that names her as his mother.