Peggy shared the following more than a year ago. Will repost this for the benefit of the new subscribers. _____________________ >From "Account of The Keim Family" by Henry May Keim, printed in 1874: The Keim family were originally from that portion of Alsace bordering on the Rhine, and were principally physicians and engineers until the "Thirty Years War," when every man took up arms and at least one member of the family, Ludwig Hercourt Keim, became a distinguished officer in the army of Bernhard of Weimer, the pupil of Gustavus Adolphus. This long and disastrous war, with its consequent calamities, scattered the family and nearly exterminated them, when John Keim, the elder, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, to obtain freedom of conscience, moved to the "new country of America," and eventually, in 1704, passed up the "Germantown Valley" and settled in Oley, now in the county of Berks, a French Huguenot settlement "remarkable in the annals of Pennsylvania." Here he took up land, lived a quiet life, and died, beloved by the whole settlement, in 1732. His son Nicholas, born in Oley on the second of April, 1719, moved, with Barbara his wife and their only son John, a lad in his sixth year, to Reading, during the November term of court, 1755. Berks County was separated from Philadelphia and other Counties in 1752. When it became the county town of a new county, many of the well to do people in the different townships took up their residence there, until in 1757, it contained two hundred and three taxable inhabitants. After a successful career as an iron merchant, Nicholas Keim handed the business over to his son John, and on the twenty-third of August, 1802, died at the advanced age of eighty-three years. John Keim, only son of Nicholas, was born on the sixth of July 1749. On the fifteenth of October, 1771, he was married to Susanna, daughter of Dr. George de Benneville. In the fall of 1777 he marched with Lt. Colonel Nicholas Lutz's Battalion of Pennsylvania Militia. Like his father, John Keim was a man of stern integrity. He studied with delight the ethical writers of England, Germany and France, and was rigid in his efforts to promote virtue by well doing and a simplicity of life. He took a great interest in everything relative to the prosperity of the borough and county. He was one of the Burgesses of Reading after its incorporation into a borough in 1783, and was elected Commissioner of Berks County from 1787 to 1790. He died on the tenth of February 1819. John Keim left four children: Daniel deB., George deB., Benneville and Esther deB. Keim.