♀Mary Elizabeth Rickert

Mary Elizabeth Rickert (23 January 1831 – 12 April 1909) was a Pennsylvania German farmer’s wife from Lebanon County who went west with her husband, Samuel Kunz, to Henry County, Indiana, and later to Clay County, Illinois, where she survived him. She was the great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her son Thomas Koons (1855–1938) and Thomas’s daughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977).

Early life

She was born on 23 January 1831, at twelve o’clock, at Millerstown in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, the eldest of the four children named in the family’s church and census records, born to Johann Friedrich Rickert, a German immigrant, and his wife Rebecca. Her birth is recorded on a printed German baptismal certificate, a Taufschein^W, filled in by hand for the family, which names her Maria. It gives her mother as “Rebecca gebornes Sch[u]nk”, the earliest record of Rebecca’s maiden name, and names the parents themselves as the child’s sponsors. Millerstown was the older name of Annville, the town laid out by Alexander Miller, and she was christened there on 13 March 1831 at Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran Church.

The family later moved to the Jonestown area, where Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church baptized her younger sisters Karalina and Sophia and her brother Reuben. The census of 1850 found the household in East Hanover Township, Lebanon County: her father, aged 47 and born in Germany, her mother, and the four children, with Mary, written “Mary Rickerd”, aged nineteen, beside Caroline, fifteen, Sophia, thirteen, and Reuben, nine.

Marriage and family

On 5 October 1854, at Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jonestown, she married Samuel Kunz (1825–1904), who had been christened at Jonestown. The couple had two children, Thomas, born in December 1855, and Malinda, born about 1858, both in Pennsylvania. By 1860 the family had moved to Greensboro Township, Henry County, Indiana, where they farmed for the next twenty years; the 1860 census, which wrote the name “Coones”, found Mary, aged twenty-eight, and Samuel, thirty-five, with Thomas, four, and Melinda, two. In 1870 Samuel held land there worth $1,600. By 1880 the children had left home, and Samuel was still farming in Greensboro Township. Her brother Reuben died in Greensboro Township in 1915. Her sister Sophia, widowed under the name Newton, remarried at Knightstown, Henry County, on 21 September 1905, to Joseph Shultz, born in York County, Pennsylvania, about 1836; that record names their parents as John Rickert and Rebecca Shank.

Illinois and widowhood

Between 1880 and 1900 she and Samuel moved to the Town of Harter in Clay County, Illinois, where the family name was written Koons. In a will made on 18 October 1894, Samuel left her “all my real and personal property to have and to hold as her absolute property so long as she remains my widow”, with the personal property then to be divided equally between their two children, and forty acres of Clay County land to each of them. The 1900 census found the couple at Harter.

Samuel died at his house in December 1904. As Mary Koons, she swore that he had died “on or about the 10th day of December”; her proof of death was filed with the will in January 1905, and the will was proved that March. A Find a Grave memorial gives her death as 12 April 1909 in Clay County, Illinois, and her burial at Camp Ground Cemetery, Xenia, beside her husband, who had been buried there in December 1904; no death record for her has been found, and the latest record naming her is the proof of death.

Notes

The baptismal certificate gives her birth as 23 January 1831. A published index gives 23 December 1830, a misreading of the same date. The spelling of her mother’s maiden name on the certificate is uncertain: the letter after “Sch-” may be read as u or e, giving Schunk or Schenk.