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Part of the American
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Jane Sumner Owen Keim
The family roll of honor in the
Revolution contains the names of eighteen heroes in the three
collateral lines of Sumner descent from the colonists, some of
whom belong to that of Mrs. Keim, including also Robert, the son
of her fighting ancestor. Captain John Sumner.
Mrs. Keim's paternal
great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Owen, born in 1761, at
Ashford, Connecticut, fourth descendant from Samuel and
Priscilla Belcher Owen, who came to America from Wales in 1685,
with their son Josiah, and settled first in Massachusetts and
later in Rhode Island, was a captain in the Windham County,
Connecticut, militia. The sixth line of Mrs. Keim's Colonial and
Revolutionary ancestry, the Palmers, descended from Walter, the
settler in the Endicott Colony, through Ruth Palmer, her
great-grandmother, were also distinguished for patriotic service
in the Revolution. Dr. Joseph Palmer, the father of Ruth Palmer,
served as a surgeon in the Continental forces. At the outbreak
of the Revolution he was captain of a company from Voluntown for
the relief of Boston during the Lexington alarm.
Mrs. Jane Sumner Owen Keim was born in Hartford, Connecticut,
and educated in the public schools of her native city,
graduating in 1862 from the high school, formerly the Latin
grammar school, founded in 1636, the second oldest institution
of the kind in America. She took a higher course of two years at
East Greenwich Seminary, on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.
She engaged immediately in charitable
work in the city of her birth, teaching seven years in the Sixth
Ward Evening School, and was active in city mission, Sunday and
sewing schools. She also organized, with Miss Fannie Smith,
authoress, pianist, and lecturer, and conducted for some years a
boys' reading room and Sixth Ward Temperance Society, out of
which initial movement sprung the "union for home work," a noble
charity in Hartford to-day.
Mrs. Keim has the gratification of
knowing that many boys taught by her in charity have become men
of prosperous business in several states. On June 25, 1872, she
became the wife of deBenneville Randolph Keim, of "Edgemount,''
Reading, Pennsylvania, an author and Washington correspondent.
They spent six months in foreign travel. They visited the
localities associated with their ancestral families and nearly
all the countries of Europe, extending their journey to Nijni
Novgorod, on the Volga.
Women of
America
Source: The Part Taken by Women in
American History, By Mrs. John A. Logan, Published by The Perry-Nalle
Publishing Company, Wilmington, Delaware, 1912.
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