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BIOGRAPHICAL AND PORTRAIT CYCLOPEDIA

nine children -- seven sons and two daughters: Mary, wife of Samuel McDermot; James, who owns farms in Clearfield. and Carroll townships; William, who was a farmer and stockdealer and owned the home farm; John, Peter and George, who followed farming in Carroll township, where they owned good farms; Amelia, who became deaf and dumb from sickness; Samuel; and Michael, who was a farm-owner in Carroll township.     Samuel Weakland was born at Loretto, in 1805, and died on his farm in September, 1887, aged eighty-two years. One biographer said of him that, "he was one of the oldest and most respected citizens of the northern part of the county." He was a Catholic, and resided in the Weakland settlement, near St. Joseph's church, in Carroll township. He married Margaret McAteer, whose people came from Ireland and settled near Loretto. Mr. and Mrs. Weakland reared a family of four children: Anselum, whose name appears at the head of this sketch; Catherine, wife of James Kirkpatrick, of Carroll township; Levi, a lumber-dealer of Cumberland, Maryland, and John, who is engaged in farming on the home farm in Carroll township. MARTIN DIETHRICH, a substantial farmer of Chest township, and who was with Sherman in the march from Georgia to North Carolina, is a son of Matthias and Magdalene (Bowman) Diethrich, and was born near "Water Street," Centre county, Pennsylvania, in March, 1837. His paternal grandfather, George Diethrich, was a native of Alsace-Lorraine, now a province of the German empire, but a part of France when Mr. Diethrich lived within its boundaries. He came, in 1825, to Pittsburg, which he soon left to locate in Chest township, this county, where

he bought and cleared up a tract of one hundred and fifty acres of woodland. He was a successful farmer in his old-world home, and brought sufficient means with him to buy and improve his land in a few years, so that it was equal in value and improvements to those tracts upon which many of the early settlers had spent almost a lifetime of labor and toil. He married in Alsace-Lorraine, where all of his twelve children were born. The youngest child was Matthias Diethrich, who spent the first twelve years of his active life in the employ of the old canal company, being stationed at Hollidaysburg, Blair county. At the end of that time he returned to his father's farm, where he passed the remainder of his life in farming. He died in 1871, when over fifty years of age. He was a member of the Catholic church, and married Magdalene Bowman, who died in 1854, aged forty-four years. They were the parents of four sons and seven daughters: Matthias, who died early in life; Martin; Peter, who was a Union soldier, and died a prisoner in Libby prison; John, who is now deceased; Catherine, married Michael Cronan, and is now deceased; Elizabeth, wife of John Baker, a farmer, of Chest township; Lena, married Louis Beamer, of Susquehanna township; Annie, now dead; Clara, wife of Thomas Gill, a resident of the city of Altoona; the others died young. After his first wife's death Mr. Diethrich married Mary Eberhart, by whom he had one child, a son named Philip J.     Martin Diethrich was reared on the farm, trained up carefully to habits of economy and thrift, and upon attaining his majority, engaged in farming and lumbering, which have been his life employments ever since. In 1866 he purchased and removed to his present farm of one hundred and seventy-five acres of good

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