"You know the old saying that, " You can make anything of a boy that you wish, but—to do this, you must begin with his grandfather."

This quaint and somewhat complex way of stating what runs in an old man's head when he has known and survived several generations of a family stock, only expresses what the laws of heredity teach, that a man is really the sum of his ancestors with all the modifications of his education and surrounding circumstances.

The lines of the Case family take us, on the paternal side, back to Holland, from which four brothers, Christopher, Theophilus, Reuben and Butler, migrated early in the last century.

We know little of them as individuals—only that they came from a nation which had fought the longest and bloodiest wars for religious and civil liberty against Spanish domination and the Spanish Inquisition, and had become the rival of Great Britain for the supremacy of the high seas, and in the planting of colonies in America, Africa and the East Indies.

The Hollanders who came to our shores, both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were men of the strongest fiber, and left tokens of their superior quality.

They were well educated, very practical, and strongly protestant, and have left indelible marks on the institutions of our common country.

These Holland Cases settled on Long Island and in Morris county, New Jersey - and one of them, Butler, moved into Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, in 1778, where his son Meshach Case, a young farmer, settled, and married Magdalene Eckstein in 1780.

On the maternal side there is more knowledge of its history. Leonard Eckstein, the grandfather of the elder Leonard Case, was a native of Bavaria and born near the ancient city of Nuremburg, that old walled and castellated city founded in medieval times, about ninety miles north of Munich on the river Pegnitz. ....

In 1750 this Leonard Eckstein was a fiery and disputatious youth of nineteen, and had a quarrel with the Catholic clergy of Nuremburg. He and all his family were Protestant.

The quarrel resulted in his being thrown into prison, where, shut up in a high tower, he was treated with severity, and nearly starved. Fortunately his jailers allowed his sister to visit him and to carry to him food and other comforts. These two conspired for his escape. One day she brought to him a cake in which she had baked a long and slender silken cord.

They had discovered that the small window in his cell gave out upon a perpendicular wall eighty feet above the ground.

Upon a dark night agreed upon, the silken cord was let down from the window, and a confederate below fastened to it a larger cord or rope which Eckstein drew up to the aperture, fastened, and slid down upon, to the earth below.

His father and family, fearing that this escape and his independent disposition would bring him into greater trouble, furnished him with a little money and he fled towards Holland, where he took ship for America.

He landed in Philadelphia about 1750, a youth of nineteen, without a cent or an acquaintance in the country.

The story has a flavor of romance; but he bravely pushed his way into Virginia, married in Winchester, and moved again into western Pennsylvania, where his daughter Magdalene married Meshach Case.

There he told the story to his grand-children and showed his hands, scarred by the blisters which the cord had made as he slid down from the old Nuremburg tower window.

He lived till about 1799, and his grandson, Leonard Case, Sr., to whom he related the story, has left us his testimony of it in his own narrative of early memories.

Mr. Case, in his narrative says of Leonard Eckstein, his grandfather: "He was a man of more than ordinary mind; of strong convictions and fearless in his expression of his opinions. He had had a good education, was a good Latin scholar, and spoke English so perfectly that no one would have suspected his being a German. His difficulty with the Catholic priesthood made a deep and bitter impression on his mind, and it lasted as long as he lived. He had read the scriptures so much that he seemed to have them committed to memory. He was always ready for religious discussion when he met an antagonist of sufficient caliber, otherwise he would not engage."

As the fruit of this union of the German and Holland stocks, Leonard Case, Sr., was born July 29, 1786, in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, near the Monongahela river, and was the oldest son in a family of eight children. ...."

Source: Tracts of the WRHS 73-84 1892 pages 221-223
Written by James D Cleveland

Learn how we found this information.

A genealogy website reveals that "Case" may be an Americanization of the Dutch "Kaase" or "Kaas" which means "cheese maker."

Ordinarily a commencement address of the 19th century is lost to all but the most serious scholar who, in this instance, might find it in the archives at Case Western Reserve University.

But Judge Cleveland was a member of the Western Reserve Historical Society. In the same year, 1890, his talk became tract number 79, in a series the WRHS would publish from time to time.

That too might have hidden his remarks from our view. But in 1892 the Society published 12 of those tracts as a book. A copy found its way to the library of Indiana University.

Now move ahead more than 100 years - to 2004 when the search engine company Google embarked on an enormous project: to scan and digitize entire libraries of books.

In June 2007 the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a nationwide consortium of universities, agreed to digitize the most distinctive collections across all of its libraries as part of the Google Book Search project.

The cover of the 1892 book of tracts