>From the book: Building Little Italy: Philadelphia's Italians Before Mass Migration by Richard N. Juliani... "Three months later Ceronio engaged Jasper Moylan to represent him in Philadelphia in a more personal matter - the disputed estate of William Hicks. Hicks, who had died about twelve months earlier, was the father of Ceronio's wife, Catherine Hicks. Moylan provided John Dickinson, president of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, with various documents as evidence - " to finish this business," in the attorney's words. The documents included a note from the Reverend Mathias Hultgreen, rector of the Swedish churches in Pennsylvania, certifying that he had performed the marriage of Stephen Ceronio and Catherine Hicks on May 12, 1784. Two months afterward, Moylan reported that Dickinson had awarded a bond of 75 ounces in gold to Ceronio as the husband of Catherine, as well as a legacy of 300 pounds, left by William Hicks to her, with the accumulated interest of twelve years. Catherine's brothers appear to have been excluded from the award. William, the youngest and his father's namesake, had been apprenticed at the age of fourteen by indenture in 1781 to John Dunlap and David C. Claypoole, the well-known printers. After suffering the death of his father, and indentured and omitted from the will, this misfortune-plagued youth appears to have died in 1784, leaving Ceronio as the principal beneficiary of the Hicks family estate. Subsequent events continued to cloud Ceronio's personal life. In 1794, in a ceremony at Gloria Dei, the old Swedish church, Catherine Ceronio, identified as a daughter of the late William Hicks, married Jacques Servel, a physician aboard a French frigate docked at Philadelphia. What had become of Ceronio by then, as well as of his marriage to Catherine, is unclear. The angry rival's early characterization of Ceronio's motives as "rascally reasons," and of the person himself as a "rogue," invites speculation about these final years. Presumably a Roman Catholic when he first arrived from Italy, Ceronio had married Catherine Hicks in a Swedish Lutheran ceremony and gained a handsome inheritance through his bride. Yet her brother became indentured only shortly before his own death at a young age. When Ceronio's name later appeared as a donor for the expansion of the chapel and the building of a rectory at Old St. Joseph's he had resurfaced as a charitable supporter of the Catholic Church. Although Ceronio may well have been, as one writer has claimed, "a secret agent in the employment of the American revolutionaries," the exact nature of his service in the West Indies, as well as other details of his life, remains unclear. The early idealism, first suggested by his father's letters to Franklin, however, may have been replaced by more materialistic ambitions in later years." Vince Summers