An aging Michael Keith is the last remaining member of his Germanic family who came from the old country to America in the mid-18th century. In 1821, near the end of his full life, he dictates to his son an in-depth journal filled to the brim with dry humor. He relates the family's poverty-filled life in a rural setting of the old country, their death-defying ocean voyage to America, and a life-saving friendship they found in Philadelphia. Michael recalls the making of a home from an un-cleared wilderness of the Pennsylvania frontier and about the marrying, dying, and war years that followed. Love, humor, joy, sadness, grief, and a deep-rooted religious faith are all intertwined in Michael's intriguing story of a family whose success in America hung in a delicate balance of seemingly endless challenges and hard-fought successes. In short, it is a riveting story that breathes the richness and full-color of life into the black-and-white genealogical facts of this real-life Pennsylvania Dutch family. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Keith, a baby-boomer, was born a preacher's kid in southwest Missouri and grew up in neighboring southeast Kansas. His father handed down to him an obvious Ozark Mountain hillbilly drawl, a dubious gift that just keeps on giving. After spending three years as an officer in the U.S. Navy aboard a destroyer during the Vietnam War, Bob earned a master of Business Administration degree from the University of Oklahoma in Norman; Boomer Sooner His professional career was primarily spent as a manager in higher education information systems, more understandably, university computer stuff. When he retired, Bob ad his wife Judy moved from northern Virginia to be closer to their original Midwestern roots. For the past several years Bob has addictively worked as an amateur genealogist researching and creating an extensive family tree of his father's early ancestors. Realizing that the results of his work would never be able to reveal the human side of his early fore-bearers, Bob opted to write a fact-based fictional story about their lives.