of August, 1804. He was a graduate of the University
of Pennsylvania, studied law and was admitted to practice in
Philadelphia. He then came to Ohio and was admitted to the bar in
Cincinnati and soon after settled in Lancaster. In 1829, soon
after the death of my father, he married my eldest sister, Mary
Elizabeth. He did not long pursue his profession but became a
merchant. He was prominent as a member of the board of public
works. In old militia times he was in command of the forces of
the state as its only major-general. He was grand master of the
Grand Lodge of Masons in Ohio for a series of years, and at the
same time held high rank in the Grand Lodge of the United States.
He was a handsome and accomplished gentleman, of pleasing manners
and liberal to a fault. He died on the 17th of December, 1883, at
Lancaster, in his eightieth year.

Of my mother I can scarcely write without emotion, though she died
more than forty years ago. Her maiden name was Mary Hoyt. She
was a member of a family, mostly merchants and sailors, who had
lived in Norwalk, Connecticut, since its first settlement. At the
period of the American Revolution the Hoyt family, composed of
several brothers, was divided in their allegiance, some as Tories,
some as Whigs. My mother's grandfather was a Whig. It is a
tradition in the family that one of the Tory brothers pointed out
the house of his brother, at the capture of Norwalk by the British
and Tories, as the nest of a rebel, and it was burned to the ground.
In this it shared the fate of the greater part of the town. The
Tories of the family went to St. Johns, but years after the war
was over they and their descendants returned to Connecticut and
New York, and many of them became prominent and respected citizens.
Isaac Hoyt, my grandfather, was a prominent citizen of Norwalk,
possessing considerable wealth for those days.

My mother was carefully educated at the then famous female seminary
at Poughkeepsie, New York. I remember the many embroidered pictures,
made with the needle and silk thread by the handicraft of my mother,
as a school girl, carefully framed, that decorated the old house
in Lancaster. The women of that day were trained more for the
culture and ornament of the house, more to knit stockings and weave
home spun than to make speeches on woman's rights. Soon after her
graduation she married Charles Robert Sherman, as before stated,
and their lives were blended. She