♂Thomas Koons

Thomas Koons (17 December 1855 – 22 July 1938) was a Pennsylvania-born farmer who lived in Indiana, Illinois and Oklahoma, and who married a woman born with his own surname. He died at 82 when he was killed in an automobile collision on the Milan road west of Willmar, Minnesota, far from his Oklahoma home. He was the grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his daughter Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977).

Early life

Thomas Koons was born on 17 December 1855 in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, the son of Samuel Kunz (1825–1904) and Mary Elizabeth Rickert (1831–1909). A FamilySearch index of Pennsylvania births and christenings gives his christening as 15 June 1856 at Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jonestown, the church where his parents had married in October 1854. The family moved west while he was a small child: the census of 1860 found them in Greensboro Township, Henry County, Indiana, with Thomas aged four and a younger sister, Malinda. In 1870 he was still at home in Greensboro, aged fourteen, while his father farmed land valued at $1,600. Those two children were the whole family; his father’s will later named them as “my two children namely Thomas Koons and Malinda Koons”.

Marriage and family

On 24 December 1876, in Henry County, Indiana, Thomas married Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923); a FamilySearch index of the marriage gives that date, while a second index gives 22 December. Her baptism at the same Zion church in December 1856 names her father as Jacob Kunz, and Thomas’s death certificate gives his wife as “Magdalene Kuns”. A family letter lists her father Jacob and Thomas’s father Samuel among the nine children of John Kunz and Cattarina Gingerich of Lebanon County, which would make the couple first cousins. Samuel’s place in that family is supported by Pennsylvania church records, and Jacob’s by John’s will of 1864, which names Jacob among the sons appointed executors.

Four of the couple’s children were living in 1910, born between 1879 and 1893; Magdalena’s entry in that census gives eight children born and four living. A FamilySearch census index places their infant son Joseph at Greensboro in 1880, and by 1885 they had moved to Clay County, Illinois, where their daughter Mary Magdalene was born at Flora. The 1900 census lists their sons Joseph and Will in a household at Harter, in Clay County, and the 1910 census lists Thomas there, in Harter Township, as a farmer and head of household. His parents also settled in Harter. In a will made on 18 October 1894, Samuel Koons of Harter left his wife “all my real and personal property to have and to hold as her absolute property so long as she remains my widow”, and then divided the personal property equally between his two children; Thomas was left the southwest quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 5 of Township 2 North, Range 6 East, in Clay County, a forty-acre parcel. Samuel died at his house in Harter in December 1904, and the will was proved in March 1905. In January 1910 Mary Magdalene married Clarence Eugene Walrath in Illinois.

Oklahoma and death

A Pennsylvania newspaper notice of April 1919 places Magdalena at Homestead, Blaine County, Oklahoma, and in 1920 their son Joseph was farming at Deep Creek, in Major County. Family-tree entries place Thomas himself in Major County in 1920 and at Deep Creek in 1930, but no census page for him is known. The Watonga Republican of 20 December 1923 reported that Mrs. Thomas Koons, mother of Joseph Koons, had died the Thursday before, after six months with cancer, and that she was buried in the Homestead cemetery after a funeral on the Saturday. Find a Grave gives her death as 13 December 1923 at Homestead.

Thomas Koons died on 22 July 1938, a Friday, in a collision on the Milan road west of Willmar, Minnesota, at the crossroad by School No. 111. The West Central Tribune of Willmar reported the next day that Thomas Koons of Okeene, Oklahoma, aged 82, had been killed in the crash and that his body would be shipped to Oklahoma for burial; his grandson Nick Walrath, aged 17, was injured. The records do not say what had taken him to Minnesota. His daughter Mary Magdalene and her family were living in Kandiyohi County by 1920. A Minnesota deaths index names the parents of Thomas Koons as Samuel Koons and “Mary Richard”, and a Find a Grave listing gives his burial at Homestead, Blaine County, Oklahoma, where Magdalena is also buried.

Notes

Samuel’s will and probate use the spelling Koons throughout; he is listed here under the form Kunz, the spelling of his 1854 marriage entry in Pennsylvania.