Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/28

 from Jestyn ap Gwyrgan in the eleventh century. He displayed a coat of arms showing descent from the royal families in England and France, the earliest assertion of such a right made in America. In Philadelphia he was a member of assembly and a judge of the court of common pleas. A contemporary biography says he was “Well descended from the ancient Britons.” His wife, Barbara Aubrey, came from Reginald Aubrey, one of the Norman conquerors of Wales, and was nearly related to the William Aubrey who married Letitia, daughter of William Penn. Elizabeth Bevan, therefore, could prove her descent from Edward III, John of Gaunt, Warwick the King Maker, the Fair Maid of Kent, the loss of whose garter led to the establishment of the ancient order, and many other historical characters. The blood of Mary Lane was consequently English and Welsh. I have an indistinct recollection of her. The Lanes were a short-lived stock, but she reached an age of over eighty years. She long suffered from rheumatism, which twisted her hands, but she retained her skill in needlework and made very pretty silk pincushions. I have two of them and her long knit garter.

My father, Isaac Anderson Pennypacker, was born July 15, 1812, on the Pickering. As a youth he worked on the farm and in the mill. He went to a country school and learned arithmetic as far as cube root, mensuration, algebra, trigonometry and surveying. Later he was sent to Bolmar's Academy, in West Chester, and there acquired some knowledge of French and Latin. Later he studied medicine in the office of his uncle. Dr. Isaac Anderson, and at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he was graduated in 1833, writing a thesis upon “Sleep.” He was about six feet in height, weighed two hundred and twenty pounds and was unusually impressive in both feature and figure. A daughter of Doctor Dorr, rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia, told me that one of the Wetherill women told her that once on a visit to the Wetherills, on the Perkiomen, 22