John LITCHARD's father, Joseph came to America quite young. To pay for transportation he indentured himself into the services "of a German family" in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When his term of service expired he married a "German girl" and they moved to Muncy Valley, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. Joseph's friend, Mr. Shoemaker owned several thousand acres of recently patented lands and about 1793 sold Joseph a 400 acre tract in the Muncy Hills.

It was here, and under these primitive conditions, that John Litchard grew up into manhood; and it was here on a tract of land adjoining the 400 acres, as Jacob recently informed me, that John and Aunt Margaret (Gernhardt), about 1807, commenced their married life, a period of which but little is now remembered. How many facts and incidents of interest were consigned to the graves of our kindred of the second generation can not even be conjectured. From the Muncy Hills John and Margaret moved and dwelt for some years on a farm about one mile east of Muncy, then a hamlet known as Pennsboro. The six eldest of their ten children-William, David, John, George, Elizabeth and Mary-were all born in Muncy Creek Township, Lycoming County, the first named December 8, 1808, and Mary on the 18th day of April, 1818. It was while Mary was a babe that Margaret and her family migrated to the town of Sparta, N.Y., and settled near her sister, Magdalena Shafer, on the second tract of land that her father, Heinrich, had bought, and which, according to his last will and testament, made in February, 1820, he bequeathed to her and designated as being the land "whereon John Litchard lives."