♂Michael Shank

Michael Shank (died 1759) was a landholder of Conestoga Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the father of eight children named in his will, who by a deed of 29 September 1757 conveyed to his son and namesake a tract of 110 acres on Conestoga Creek. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014) by two separate lines of descent, both through that son, Michael Shank (died before 10 February 1777).

The 1757 deed survives only as quoted in a later one. His son held the land until he “lately died intestate”, and by a deed of 10 February 1777 the son’s widow and children released their shares in it to one of the heirs, John Shank; it was recorded at Lancaster in 1786. Its account of how the son had come by each tract names “Michael Shank the elder the Father of the said Michael Shank deceased” as the man who conveyed the 110 acres to him in 1757. The bounds it copies began at a white oak stump by “Connestogo Creek” and came back to the creek at a maple, following the water down to the starting point.

His will and death

He made his will on 17 March 1759, “being very Sick & weak of body”, and it was proved at Lancaster on 20 May 1759. He died between those two dates. Abraham Myer and Henry Shank witnessed the will, and his sons Michael and John were named as executors.

He left his plantation of 173 acres in Conestoga Township to his son Tobias. His other children, Michael, Jacob, John, Henry, Christian, Adam, and Margaret the wife of Peter Wyland, were to share fifty pounds a year among them “till the Youngers have as much as the Eldest”, some of them having already had one hundred and fifty pounds. That makes eight children in all.

For his “beloved Wife Mary” he provided her widow’s right in his house, kitchen and cellar for life, and yearly wheat, pork, beef, hemp, wool, cider and apples from Tobias’s plantation. The will does not say that Mary was the mother of the children, but the 1757 deed calls the younger Michael “their said Son”, so she was probably his mother, and probably the mother of his brothers and sister as well.

On the account of a family history published in 1994, he was born about 1695 in Germany, the son of Christian Schenk, a Swiss Mennonite from Eggiwil in the canton of Bern, who came to Pennsylvania in 1717 and died in 1724 in Strasburg Township. In that account he bought 173 acres from George Gray in Conestoga in 1740 and was taxed there from 1725. The same history gives the later lives of his children: Christian (1719–1803) in Martic Township, John (died 1791) and Henry (died 1805) in York County, Jacob (died in 1759 or 1760), Tobias (died 1767), Adam (died about 1803) in Rockingham County, Virginia, and Margaret, who married Peter Wyland.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his son Michael, Michael’s daughter Magdalena Shank (1752–1837), who married Peter Gingerich (1749–1829), and her daughter Cattarina Gingerich (1793–1861), the wife of John Kunz (1786–1865). They divide between Cattarina’s sons Samuel Kunz (1825–1904) and Jacob John Kunz (1814–1866), and meet again when Samuel’s son Thomas Koons (1855–1938) married Jacob’s daughter Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923) on 24 December 1876 in Henry County, Indiana. Their daughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977) was the mother of Ora Emogene Walrath. John Kunz’s will, dated 29 July 1864, names a son Jacob as one of his executors; that this Jacob is Jacob John Kunz rests on a family letter of 1916 and on the two men living in the same county.