♀Rebecca Shenk

Rebecca Shenk (1805 – before 1880) was a Pennsylvania German woman of Lebanon County who married the East Prussian emigrant Johann Friedrich Rickert and moved west with him to Henry County, Indiana, by 1860. She was the great-great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her daughter Mary Elizabeth Rickert (1831–1909), Mary’s son Thomas Koons (1855–1938) and Thomas’s daughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977).

Marriage and family

She married Johann Friedrich Rickert (born 1803), who had been born in Kaukehmen parish in East Prussia. An index to the register of Zion German Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, Dauphin, Pennsylvania, records the marriage of Johann Friedrich Rickert and Rebecca Shenk on 4 March 1830. Their first child, Maria, later known as Mary Elizabeth, was born at Millerstown, the older name of Annville, in Lebanon County, on 23 January 1831, and was christened on 13 March at Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran Church there. Her baptismal certificate names the parents themselves as her sponsors. By 1836 the family had moved to the Jonestown area, where Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church baptized three more children: Karalina in 1836, Sophia in 1838 and Reuben in 1842.

The census of 1850 found the household in East Hanover Township, Lebanon County, with Rebecca listed as “Rebacca Rickerd”, aged forty-five, beside her husband, aged forty-seven and born in Germany, and all four children.

Indiana

The censuses of 1860 and 1870, as indexed, place her at Greensboro Township, Henry County, Indiana; her daughter Mary Elizabeth and son-in-law Samuel Kunz were living in the same township by 1860. Her death is given as before 1880, an inference rather than a record: no record of her death or burial has been found.

Notes

Her son Reuben’s death certificate of 1915, completed on information from his widow, gives his mother’s maiden name as “Rebecka Sparks”. If she died before 1880, she had been dead at least thirty-five years by then. The same certificate gives Reuben’s father as born in Pennsylvania and Reuben’s own birth as 31 August 1843, where the 1850 census gives the father’s birthplace as Germany and the christening places Reuben’s birth about 1841. The three earlier records of her maiden name, from 1830 to 1905, all give a form of Shenk, and none supports Sparks.

Early life and name

She was born in Pennsylvania about 1805; the census of 1850 gives her age as forty-five. The register of Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church at Hummelstown, Dauphin County, records the baptism in 1804 of Rebecca, written Schenk there, daughter of John Schenk and Maria Bauer, though that entry is known only from a transcription. The fit is reasonable: the year suits the age the census gives her, and Hummelstown lies about eight miles from Harrisburg, where she married in March 1830 at Zion German Lutheran Church. The link is only tentative, because nothing in her own records names her parents, the sponsors at the baptisms of her four children were their own mother and father, and another Schenk couple, George and Maria, also baptized children at Hummelstown in those years. The indexed baptisms of Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church at Jonestown, the family’s later parish, hold no entry for her.

Her maiden name survives in two records made for her children and in the index entry for her marriage at Harrisburg. The printed German baptismal certificate^W of her eldest daughter, filled in by hand in 1831, names the mother as “Rebecca gebornes Sch[u]nk”; the letter after “Sch-” can be read as u or e, giving Schunk or Schenk. In 1905 the Indiana record of her daughter Sophia’s second marriage gives the bride’s parents as John Rickert and Rebecca Shank. Shenk, Schenk, Schunk and Shank are forms of one German surname, and which spelling Rebecca’s own family used is not known.