Simon S. Blake was born in Martinsburg, Bedford (later Blair) Co., Pennsylvania, 29 October 1829, the son of Burdine Blake (1800-1874) and Mazey Ann Simpkins (1794-1867). He married Mary Magdalena Ambrose (1836-1909), the daughter of John Walker Ambrose (1798- 1880) and Salome Kanable (1804-1882), 18 January 1855, in Orion, Wisconsin. They had ten children, two died in infancy. He served in the Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry for three years during the Civil War. He died 5 March 1904 in Richland Center, Wisconsin. Descendants are scattered throughout the United States.

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Anyone wishing to know what has been written on the Pennsylvania Germans will welcome the reappearance of this classic bibliography. Anyone aspiring to a command of the literature on the Pennsylvania Germans must master its contents; and anyone doing research in Pennsylvania-German genealogy must have it at his side. It is basic, and no efficient research can be done without it. Divided into subject categories, the bibliography contains citations to all published writings dealing with the Germans in colonial North America (chiefly Pennsylvania), whether in the form of general histories, magazine articles, newspapers, pamphlets, mug-books, church records, town, county, and state histories, or printed genealogies, and it attempts to give as complete an account of the printed source material as possible. It is in effect the starting point in Pennsylvania-German research because it acquaints the researcher with everything that had been published up through the cut-off year of 1933.

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