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OF CAMBRIA COUNTY. 389

farming and grazing land, which is all underlaid with a valuable vein of coal. In addition to lumbering and farming he owns, in connection with his son, Albert, a mercantile establishment at Hastings. During the late Civil War, on December 22, 1864, he enlisted in Company E, One Hundred and Ninety-seventh Pennsylvania infantry, and was with Sherman in his march and battles from Savannah, Georgia, to Goldsboro, North Carolina, being discharged on August 28, 1865, at Gaston, North Carolina. He is a democrat, and has served several terms as a member of the school board of his township. He is a member of the Catholic church, and his good health and good judgment have made him successful, influential and a man of standing in his community.
    On July 3, 1860, Mr. Diethrich married Christina Yahner, a daughter of Martin and Elizabeth (Shortin) Yahner, of Chest township. To Mr. and Mrs. Diethrich have been been born seven sons and six daughters: Louis, a farmer; Albert, a merchant, of Hastings; Annastatia, wife of John Bearer, of Susquehanna township; Magdalene, married Anthony Hagg, of Tyrone, Blair county; Elizabeth Geraldine, wife of Irvin Boucher, a resident of Spangler; Gertrude; Matthias A.; Ida, now deceased, and Loretta, Martin, Jr., Herman, Stephen, Cora, and Emery E., who are still at home.


THOMAS P. KEEDY, assistant superintendent of the great Cambria rollingmill, and who was instrumental in securing the erection of the present Thirteenth Ward Public School building of Johnstown, is a son of Grafton Jacob and Sarah Ellen (Morrison) Keedy, and was born at Duncansville, Blair county, Pennsylvania, December 13, 1856.

The Keedy and Morrison families are respectively of German and Scotch ancestry; and the former was founded in Maryland, where Henry J. Keedy, the paternal grandfather of the subject of this sketch, was born at Sharpsburg. Henry J. Keedy was an active business man and operated a cotton factory and flouring mill at Keedysville, where a fire occurred in 1844 and destroyed his property. He never rebuilt, but opened a hotel at Sharpsburg, which he conducted up to the time of his death, in 1858, at sixty years of age. He was a married man, and his son, Grafton Jacob Keedy, was born and reared at Sharpsburg, Maryland, which he left in 1859 to become a a resident of Martinsburg, Virginia, now West Virginia. He was postmaster of Martinsburg during the late Civil War, and then served in the car-tracing office of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad company until the time of his death, which occurred in 1877, when he was in the forty-fifth year of his age. He was an exemplary member of the United Brethren church; and married Sarah Ellen Morrison, who was born at Antietam, Maryland, in 1833, and is now a resident of Duquesne, this State, where she is a member of the Methodist Episcopal church.
    Mrs. Keedy is a granddaughter of Parkinson Morrison, who was a native of Maryland, and died at Hagerstown, that State, in 1878, at the ripe old age of ninety-nine years. His son, Henry Morrison, the father of Mrs. Keedy, was a native of Antietam, and a Lutheran, and in 1850 went to Duncansville, Blair county, which he left ten years later to settle at Johnstown, where he was a foreman in the puddling-mill of the Cambria Iron company, and where he died in 1863, at the age of sixty-one years.
    Thomas P. Keedy was reared principally at


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