Page:Mennonite Handbook of Information 1925.djvu/87

 most tragic and harrowing circumstances that God has ever permitted to befall the Mennonite Church in America.

It was also in the year 1764 that John Hooley and family, along with other Mennonite families, were compelled to leave their newly established homes in the upper Susquehanna Valley to escape Indian attack. It was because of these conditions that they were led to locate permanently in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania.

In about the year 1760 the Hartman family in Lebanon county, Pennsylvania, was raided by Indians while the mother and a son had gone to mill several miles from home. Several Indians entered the house where they killed the father and one son, and took the two remaining children, a son and a daughter named Regina, away with them as captives. The son was never heard from again, but Regina was taken to the Indian towns somewhere in the wilderness of Ohio and held as a captive for seven years, in which time she grew to womanhood. Before the home was broken up by the awful tragedy wrought by the hand of the Indians, Regina used to hear her mother sing a number of familiar hymns, one of which through her long period of captivity she never forgot.

By the treaty of 1767, she was permitted to come back home but when she reached-her former neighborhood she could recognize no x one not even her mother who searched diligently among the returned prisoners in the effort to find her. It was not until the mother began to sing some of the hymns she used to sing at the time of Regina's cnildhood that