When (what year) did these families arrive in Westmoreland Co., PA & why? I think you will find that 1769 was when the western lands over the mountains were opened for settlement by the colonial authorities in eastern Pennsylvania. Many came soon thereafter from all parts of eastern Pennsylvania of which old Northampton was a large part. (it hadn't been split up into smaller counties yet). Many of the Germanic types from Alsace and the Palatinate that had arrived in America 20-30 years or more earlier had settled on free land in old Northampton and to a large degree it was their off spring that ventured westward over the mountains into the wilderness for the free land being offered there. This good free land had become much less available in the east. Westmoreland itself became a Pennsylvania county four years later, in 1773. Phil Phil Knox <pknox@earthlink.net> My Web Page: http://home.earthlink.net/~pknox/ My genealogical database on WorldConnect: http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=pknox NOTE: E-mail and attachments are automatically scanned by McAfee Antivirus software.