Excerpt from History of the Descendants of Nicholas Beery: Born in Switzerland Emigrated From Switzerland to Pennsylvania in Complete and a Complete Genealogical Family Register With Biographies of Many of His Descendants, From the Earliest Available Records to the Present Time; Dates in Three Centuries Where do you find an intelligent people who would post pone any secular work or business transaction for 200 years, with an evident prospect of never having it accomplished? This is precisely what has been neglected in producing a written history long ago of Nicholas Beery and his many thousands of descendants. The author acknowledges that deep down in his heart he has an insuppressible feeling that we should do honor and reverence to our dear and worthy ancestors, who paved the way for our American liberties and our Christian privileges, and our present prosperity. I very much doubt whether there is one in a thousand of the readers of this history who even thinks of, or appreciates the blessings that have come to us through the emigration to America of our dear old ancestor, Nicholas Beery, of 1727. He, with thousands of others who were compelled by the Swiss government to do military service and who entertained non-resistant principles, left that domain and came to America, where religious liberty was promised to them by William Penn, through whose tireless and angelic efforts these conscientious and harmless people were sheltered in Pennsylvania. Because of persecution and oppression in Switzerland a large body of Mennonites fled from the cantons of Zurich, Berne and Schaffenhausen to Pennsylvania, where they purchased a large body of timber land of Penn's agents in Lancaster and other counties, where, among the Indians and wild beasts, the Swiss settlement formed a nucleus or center of a rapidly-increasing Swiss, German and French colony. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.