♂Martin Funk

Martin Funk (30 January 1732 – 19 December 1796) was a farmer of Lebanon Township, Pennsylvania, whose land lay against the outlots of the town of Lebanon, and who left his 250-acre homestead to his only son and an estate of more than £3,400 to be shared among his family. He was probably the fourth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his daughter Magdalena Funk (1764–1841).

Origins

Martin most likely came from Reihen, a village near Sinsheim in Baden, where his father, Hans Funk, a Mennonite, had bought a farm in 1725. He is thought to have been the Martin Funck who landed at Philadelphia on 3 November 1750 from the ship Brotherhood, Captain John Thompson, from Rotterdam and last from Cowes, and who signed the oaths there with a Hanns Funck. He was eighteen. Family tradition held that he came with his brother Hans, who settled in Frederick County, Maryland.

The town book of Reihen, as quoted to the family’s historian two centuries later, records that his father and mother had both died by 1752, and that in April 1753 a letter from “Hans and Martin Funk, in Pennsylvania” asked for their shares of the inheritance to be sold and the money sent across to them, or else for the shares to be left to their brother Heinrich, who had stayed at home. In 1755 Martin’s share passed by sale to Heinrich.

Lebanon Township

He is said to have taken out warrants for 225 acres in Lebanon Township, then part of Lancaster County, in April 1759, and for 125 acres more in 1764. By 1761 his land adjoined that of George Reynolds, one of the two men who laid out the town of Lebanon, and in 1762 it bounded two of the town’s outlots, beside land of John Light and Philip Gloninger; two of his daughters later married a Henry Light and a George Glaninger. The Lebanon Township tax lists carry him in 1771, 1772, 1773 and 1779, each time with 200 acres assessed to him, and in 1773 with two servants.

He married Judith Wenger, believed to be a daughter of Hans Wenger of Bethel Township. Martin and Judith had seven children: a son, Martin, and six daughters, Ann, Barbara, Magdalena, Christiana, Mary and Elizabeth. In 1775 Martin was one of the two executors of the will of Judith’s unmarried sister Maria, written in German; the other was her brother John. In about 1781 and again in 1782 he was enrolled in the fifth class of Captain Michael Holderbaum’s company of the Lancaster County militia.

Will and death

His will left his son Martin the home place, two tracts in Lebanon Township of 250 acres together, and divided the rest of his estate among his children, naming each daughter with her husband; their shares were to be paid out over the years, fifty pounds at a time. He named as executors his friend Isaac Sheaffer and his wife, whom the will calls Jude. He died on 19 December 1796, “late of Lebanon Township” in what was by then Dauphin County, and the will was proved on 9 January 1797. His gravestone, as translated in a family history of 1950, gives the year as 1795. When the executors brought their account before the Orphans’ Court^W, £3,461 15s 9d remained in their hands, and the court directed that it be distributed according to the will.

By the family’s account he was buried in a graveyard on his own farm, where Judith and their son Martin were later buried too, under stones inscribed in German. In 1901, after the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company had bought part of the farm and the smoke and fumes of its steel works had begun to kill the grass and wear the lettering from the stones, the burial ground was sold to the company and the graves were moved to Ebenezer Cemetery near Lebanon.

Notes

His name and dates

The will spells the surname Founk, and its heading reads “Martin Founks Will”; the Mennonite family card filed under him and the family history spell it Funck. His dates here are the card’s. His gravestone, in the translation printed in Edward Bowman Espenshade’s My American Ancestors and Their Descendants (1950), gives the same birth date but his death as 19 December 1795, and William Henry Egle’s history of Dauphin and Lebanon counties (1883) also has him die in December 1795. The same family history, working from the register’s abstract, dates the will 2 December 1795. The will was proved on 9 January 1797.

His origins

That the Martin Funk of Lebanon Township was the Martin of Reihen and of the ship Brotherhood is the argument of Espenshade’s history, built on research carried out between 1941 and 1945. Of twenty-seven arrivals of men named Funck or Funk, it found only one ship on which a Martin and a Hans came together, and a descendant born in 1853 was very sure that Martin had come over with his brother Hans. The Reihen entries are known only from letters written to the author in 1947 and 1948 by a Funk family of Waghäusel, in Baden, quoting “an old book of records in the mayor’s office in Richen”. They name the father as Hans Funk, with five children: Heinrich, Jakob, Martin, Hans and a daughter. The 1755 entry calls Martin “the eldest brother”, which sits oddly with his birth in 1732, seven years after his father bought the farm. The correspondent added that, as Mennonites, Martin and his parents were not entered in the birth register.

Other men of the name in Lancaster County were different people: the Martin Funk of Manor Township, whose will of 1780 names other children, and the older Martin Funk who married Susanna, a daughter of Jacob Sowder of Lampeter.

His daughter Magdalena

The will names her “Magdelena now the wife of Henry Light the younger”. That this was the Henry Light of Swatara Township who died in 1830, whose wife was named Magdalena, is probable rather than proved; the county held more than one Henry Light. The Mennonite card filed under Martin lists the same seven children as the will and has Magdalena married to “Henry Light Jr.”, while the card for her husband names her father as Heinrich Funk; the will points to Martin. DNA shared between her descendants and descendants of three of her sisters, Barbara, Christiana and Elizabeth, agrees with the link.

His burial

The account of the burial and the move is Espenshade’s (1950, p. 299), which quotes the deed of sale to the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company dated “4-11-1901”. A Find a Grave memorial instead gives the move as 1898, for the Bethlehem Steel plant. Shenk’s A History of the Lebanon Valley in Pennsylvania (1930) records that the company’s Lebanon interests were later merged with those of the Bethlehem Steel company, so the two accounts name the same works; their dates are not reconciled.