Above is the will of Samuel Malacreda Guildin. What a lucky find!
Anyone who knows me knows how much I loved living in Oley, Pa during my childhood. I loved the big old house on Main Street, I loved the school....I loved my life. It was a very sad day for me when we moved to Detroit. Fortunately, a lot of our relatives still live in the vicinity and I occasionally still visit Oley, just to look around and remember.
It was with deep satisfaction that I recently found out that our 6th Great Grandfather was Samuel Malacreda Guildin from Bern, Switzerland who immigrated around 1710 and settled in Oley around 1724. He married our 6th Great Grandmother Elizabeth Hilsawick in 1722. They had seven children according to his will; Samuel, John, Daniel, Susanna, Elizabeth, Frederick, and Esther. I saw on Samuel's grave site, located in Oley, that "Samuel and Elizabeth are known to have had a daughter born in 1736 that they named: Phoebe Beatrice Gulden. Phoebe married Johannes Andrew Byerly (b.1713, d.1785) in 1758 and had 3 children."
However, I did not see Phoebe in his will. You can see the grave site info at
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi page=gr&GRid=106490977&ref=acom&ftm=1.
We are descended from Samuel and Elizabeth's daughter Susanna, who was born in 1724 in Oley. She was our 5th Great Grandmother and she married our 5th Great Grandfather , John Womelsdorf, and their child was Captain Daniel Womelsdorf, our Patriot ancestor, through whom I joined the DAR.
Although I cannot find the information at this precise moment, Samuel's father, our 7th Great Grandfather was the Reverend Samuel Guildin (sometimes spelled Guilken), a Lutheran minister. His wife was Maria Magdalena Malacreda.
I am still working to find out what happened to our Forry ancestors who were massacred in 1782, near Sunbury, Pa. I have found two articles about the "Catawissa Massacre" in a biographical history of Montour, Colombia and Northumberland Counties, published in 1887, but that was more than 100 years after the event. I would like to find a more reliable source of information. It's a puzzle, but I love puzzles, too. Just like I love Oley.