In this book, historian Philip Ruth reconstructs the life, lineage, and legacy of Swiss-born farmer Jacob Hollinger (c.1701-c.1782), patriarch of a Hollinger clan whose quest for prosperity propelled it from the Bernese Aargau to the German Palatinate in the early 1700s, and later across the Atlantic Ocean to Pennsylvania. Settling in northern Lancaster County in the mid-1700s, Jacob and his sons married women from recently-immigrated Reformed and Lutheran families.