Posted By:	Eugene Stackhouse
	Email:
	Subject:	Henry Hunsicker book
	Post Date:	December 10, 2004 at 14:35:38
	Message URL:	http://genforum.genealogy.com/hunsicker/messages/242.html
	Forum:	Hunsicker Family Genealogy Forum
	Forum URL:	http://genforum.genealogy.com/hunsicker/

Forwarded from germantown@yahoogroups.com From a newspaper article in a Germantown, Philadelphia, newspaper c. 1910, from the collection of the Germantown Historical Society: At 84 years of age, Henry A. Hunsicker, of 604 Wister Street, Germantown, [Philadelphia] has undertaken to compile a genealogical and historical record of the Hunsicker family. As this family is one of the oldest and most numerous in the Pennsylvania German region, the work he has assumed is of proportions sufficient to tag the resources of a man in his prime. However, Mr. Hunsicker is so well versed in all sorts of lore relating to the Hunsickers that he is unquestionably the person best equipped for the task. Mr. Hunsicker will enter into communication with all the heads of families connected with the Hunsickers, thus gathering the record of each individual and tracing the history of the members back to the middle of the sixteenth century. The first American member of the family, it is believed, was Valentine, Hunsicker, who came from Switzerland in 1717 and settled near the Skippack Creek, in what is now Montgomery county. Mr. Hunsicker's immediate family is noted for longevity, for the aggregate age of himself and his five brothers and sisters, all living, is 454 years, an average of about 75 years. The brothers and sisters and their ages are: Mrs. Esther Fetterolf, 87 years; Miss A. Hunsicker, 75 years; Mrs. Mary A. Preston, 73 years; Mrs. Joseph H. Hendricks, 69 years; Horace M. Hunsicker, 66 years. Mr. Hunsicker's mother was within a few months of 100 years old when she died in 1898.        Mr. Hunsicker's father was the Rev. Abraham Hunsicker, a Mennonite bishop in the Perkiomen Valley, who separated from his church because of his advocacy of a policy of liberal education. He founded a new church in the little village then called Perkiomen Bridge, near the famous old stone bridge across the Perkiomen Creek, at the western terminus of the Germantown road. There in 1848, he also founded Freeland Seminary, and his son, Henry A., was the first principal.