Kathryn Lepulica
Kathryn Lepulica was born at Equinunk, Wayne County, Pennsylvania, on 14 February 1890. She was the youngest of three children of Stephen Lepulica and Anna Gabcan, and the only one born in America. Her brother Paul and sister Anna had been baptized at Zariecie, a village in the Puchov district of Trencsen county, in the Kingdom of Hungary, in what is now Slovakia. The family had crossed to the United States in 1887.
Her parents settled on the Pennsylvania bank of the Delaware, near Equinunk and across the river from Lordville, New York. They were Lutherans at home. In America they joined the Presbyterian church at Lordville when it was first organized, and her father was elected an elder there.
Her mother died at home on 13 August 1898, of consumption, which is tuberculosis. Kathryn was eight. The 1900 census lists Katie Lepulica, born February 1890, with her widowed father, her brother Paul and her sister Anna in Manchester Township. The next year her father broke down. A neighbor who signed himself Rex wrote of "physical and mental failure, wild insanity". Stephen was taken to the asylum at Danville, then to his brother in New York, then home, and he died on 28 or 29 November 1901. Rex wrote that he left "three children, a boy of about 18 years, a girl of 15, and one of 11." The one of eleven was Kathryn.
In 1910 Kathryn, 20 and single, was living in Manchester with her brother Paul as head of the household. That summer her sister Anna, the wife of James Snyder, died at 24.
On 12 February 1919, two days before her twenty-ninth birthday, she married Abraham Lincoln Snyder at the Presbyterian manse in Hancock, New York. He was 55, from Stamford, New York, and had grown children from his first marriage. They settled at Equinunk. Their son George Harvey was born on 8 August 1921 and Charles Lynn on 3 March 1928. In the 1930 census she is Katie Snyder, wife of A. Lynn Snyder, in Manchester Township.
On 10 November 1932 her husband drowned when his canoe overturned in the flooded Delaware. His body was not found until 26 January 1933, and Kathryn was the informant on his death certificate. She was 42, with two sons of eleven and four.
She married again, to Jacob Hoke, a man five years older than she was. The date is not known, but by the 1940 census she was his wife, listed at Equinunk as "Kathern" with Jacob and her two Snyder sons. That census places the family in rural Pike County, Pennsylvania, in 1935. When her sons registered for the draft, George in 1942 and Lynn in 1946, each named her as the one person who would always know where he was. In 1950 she was living in Manchester Township with Jacob Hoke and a Carl Hoke, born 1908.
She died at the Callicoon Hospital, Callicoon, New York, on Sunday 19 October 1969, after an illness. She was 79. Her funeral was held at the Tegeler Funeral Home in Damascus on 22 October, with the Rev. Newton B. Ford officiating. She was survived by Jacob Hoke, her two sons and two grandchildren. She was buried in the Equinunk Cemetery next to Abraham, under a stone reading "MOTHER / KATHRYN L. / HOKE / 1890 - 1969". Her parents, her brother and her sister lie in the same cemetery under plain head and foot stones with no names.
Sources
If Kathryn Lepulica is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Kathryn Lepulica (1890-1969)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/kathryn-lepulica-1890-1969-22ea9d.