Biography
John Kilbuck was born in Franklin County, Kansas on May 15, 1861, into a family of the Christian Munsee band of the Lenape (Delaware). His mother was Mahican, a related Algonquian tribe. Kilbuck was the great-grandson of the Lenape chief, Gelelemend, the first American Indian to sign a treaty with the United States.
Many Munsee had relocated to Kansas after their old territory in the northeast United States and Wisconsin was taken. As a bright youth, Kilbuck was encouraged by the Moravian missionaries in Kansas to go for studies at the Moravian center of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to obtain an education, first at the Nazareth Boys’ School and later at the Moravian College and Seminary. In 1884 he was the first Lenape to be ordained as a Moravian minister.
Edith Romig was born on April 16, 1865, also in Franklin County. She was the daughter of Joseph Romig, a Moravian minister among the Munsee in Ottawa, Kansas and his wife, and the granddaughter of Levi Ricksecker and his wife. Ricksecker was Romig's predecessor as minister to the Munsee in Kansas. Both Ricksecker and Romig preserved important historical information about the Munsee of that period. Edith Romig was teaching in the mission school and 19 years old when she met John Kilbuck at his return to Kansas.
Read more about this topic: John And Edith Kilbuck
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