♂Will H. Koons

Will H. Koons (23 February 1882 – 13 July 1946) was an Illinois-born man who spent most of his adult life at Storm Lake, Buena Vista County, Iowa. He was an elder brother of Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977), the mother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), which made him Ora’s uncle.

Life

William Henry Koons was born on 23 February 1882 at Flora, Clay County, Illinois, the second of the four surviving children of Thomas Koons (1855–1938) and Magdalena M. Koons (1852–1923). The census of 1900 lists him, single, in his parents’ household in Harter Township, Clay County. On 20 December 1909, at Storm Lake, Buena Vista County, Iowa, he married Maude Mae Wallin (1882–1960), a native of Marshalltown, Iowa; the county marriage record gives his age as 27, his birthplace as Flora, and his parents as Thomas and Magdalena Koons. Their only known child, Gwendolyn Wilma Koons (1917–1998), was born at Storm Lake in September 1917. The census indexes place the family at Storm Lake in 1910, in Blaine County, Oklahoma, in 1920 (the part of Oklahoma where his parents and his brother Clarence had also settled), and back at Storm Lake in 1930. Gwendolyn’s school enrollment records show the family still in Oklahoma through 1929, in Blaine and then Kingfisher counties, before the return to Iowa.

His mother died at Homestead, Blaine County, in December 1923, and an index of newspaper obituaries lists Will under the Okeene Record of 21 December 1923, most likely as a survivor named in her notice; the text of the notice itself is not known. Will Koons died at Storm Lake on 13 July 1946, aged 64, and was buried in Storm Lake Cemetery, where Maude was later buried beside him.