PART 7 Text taken from page 256 of: Beers, J. H. and Co., Commemorative Biographical Record of Washington County, Pennsylvania (Chicago: J. H. Beers & Co., 1893). Transcribed January 1997 by Neil and Marilyn Morton of Oswego, IL as part of the Beers Project. Published January 1997 on the Washington County, PA USGenWeb pages at http://www.chartiers.com/ We here close the biography of the Wise family. We regret its many omissions and imperfections, but we plead in extenuation the meagerness of our material. If any early records of the family were kept, they are now lost, and we have been compelled to rely for our information on public documents and such family traditions as we believe to be authentic. We regret that we could not give more in detail the history of the collateral branches of the family, but this the limited space at our command forbids. Our object has been to commemorate the dead rather than the living; to brush away the dust from a few noble old burial urns, in which repose the ashes of the founders of our family. Our aim has been to exhibit the trunk and primary branches from which our family has sprung, so that the generations present and to come may attach their branches thereto, and thus keep alive and in vigorous growth the old family tree. In reviewing the history of our family, we find that they have been mostly plain, practical, common people generally farmers. None of them "have stood the applause of listening senates to command," or "waded through slaughter to a throne," but some of them have honorably filled almost every position in life. Some have been representatives in Congress and in the Legislatures of their respective States. Some have been editors, some physicians, some lawyers. Some have been ministers of the Gospel of Christ, and some have stood as loyal soldiers on the battlefields of their country. None of them have been millionaires, but most of them have been well-to-do, and none so poor that they could not command their own time and lead an independent life. And best of all, none have ever lived an inebriate's life, or been convicted of an infamous crime. That the generations yet to be may emulate and excel those past and present, in all that constitutes the highest type of intellectual, moral and Christian manhood, is the wish of the author JOSEPH B. WISE. THE END**