Hello Harkeys: In answer to Alma's Nov. 2, 1997 request: "Did Sidney Levi [HARKEY] ever elucidate his relationship to that [Martin HARKEY 'der Junge"] family?" I have looked thru my materials and there is unfortunately no mention of that HARKEY family. However, as I was looking thru my material of old letters and journals and scrapbooks relating to Sidney and Simeon HARKEY I found the following names and wonder if they mean anything to anybody: FESPERMAN: In a Feb. 13, 1869 handwritten letter to Sidney, probably in Paxton, IL, from Joseph H FESPERMAN, Rowan Mills, Rowan Co., North Carolina, he wrote: "My grandfathers name was [Ted?] Fesperman I have often heard my mother say that I was related to Mr Cristopher Harkey who lived for a while near the stone Church in Rowan County". Joseph H. FESPERMAN had been preaching four years in the Lutheran Church: the first three years in the "Davie Mission & am now engage building a new Church in Rowan &c." He couldn't "preach German though my ancestors can very nearly all speake German!" JACOB CRESS SEN In Sidney's 1883 private journal, Sidney mentioned being loaned $15 by "old Lutheran father (Jacob Cress Sen)" in Hillsboro, IL to go to college in Gettysburg, PA. On another subject: HARKEY/WALCHER marriage date. I don't know that anyone is interested in this material, but here it is! Mary Russell's e-mail of Nov. 2 shows John HARKEY and Sarah WALCHER marrying on 11 Jan 1811. In their son Sidney L. Harkey's journal written somewhere between 1872 - 1901, he gave the date as 13 Jan 1811 [he could have been wrong], and that they lived near Statesville, Iredell County, NC before moving to Montgomery Co., IL [in 1830]. And, Sarah Walcher was a "daughter of Michael Walcher, who came from Wittenberg, Germany." She died of bilious fever in 1862, buried at St. John's Luth. Church, about "6 or 8 miles north of Hillsboro. Ills." John Harkey died of dropsy in 1865 and is "buried near Lancaster, Wabash County Ills." I'm enjoying the e-mails. Nancy Broersma [email protected]