♀Matilda Koons

Matilda Koons (27 February 1861 – 6 September 1948) was a Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, woman who married Jacob F. Tice, raised six children near Lebanon and lived to the age of 87. She was the younger sister of Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923), the grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014).

Early life

Matilda was born on 27 February 1861, one of the ten children of Jacob John Kunz (1814–1866) and Magdalene Holdeman (1821–1885), and was christened the same year at Jonestown, Lebanon County, under the surname Koons. A Find a Grave memorial gives her father’s death as 1866, when she was five. In 1870 she was living with her widowed mother, her sister Magdalena and her brothers John and Joseph in Union Township, where the census taker wrote the family’s name as “Kuns”.

Marriage and family

She married Jacob F. Tice, a Pennsylvanian born about 1860. No record of the marriage has been found; their eldest child was born in 1884. A Koons family record, begun as a letter by David Koons in December 1916 and brought up to date by 1924 or later, names the couple’s six children: Henry, Lizzie, Daniel, Nora, Clayton and Edith. The five whose birth years are known were born between 1884 and 1900.

When her sister Amelia Umberger died in 1919, the Lebanon Daily News listed “Mrs. Matilda Tice, R. F. D. No. 8” among the surviving sisters; the address was a rural free delivery mail route out of Lebanon. The census of 1920 found the household at Lebanon: Jacob, 60, Matilda, 58, their children Nora, 25, and Clayton, 22, their daughter Edith, 19, with her husband William Donmoyer, also 19, and a two-year-old grandson, Mark Dengler. By 1930 the couple, both given as 69, were living on their own in Heidelberg Township, Lebanon County.

Death

According to an entry in the Find a Grave index, Matilda Tice died on 6 September 1948, aged 87, and was buried at Ebenezer, Lebanon County. The date and place rest on that index; no death certificate or original burial record has been examined. Her son Henry died far from Lebanon, at Houston, Texas, in 1960.