My Genealogy Hound

GEORGE WILSON SWARTZ, the eldest child of the family and the subject of this sketch, was born in Shiremanstown, Aug. 27, 1864. Later the family moved to Boiling Springs where he passed through the primary stages of his education. In 1874 his parents moved to East Pennsboro township. He attended the country district school known as Lantz’s, where teachers changed almost as regularly as did the seasons. Among his instructors was the well-known Jesse Laverty, then far advanced in years; Also Stephen Magee, Charles H. Smith and Daniel E. Burtner, who taught the youth many valuable lessons. In the fall of 1881 he had a protracted spell of typhoid fever, which caused him to miss an entire term of school. However, as soon as he had sufficiently recovered, he took up the studies of trigonometry and surveying at his home, and under the instructions of his father, who was a skillful and practical surveyor, acquiring an efficiency in these branches that has always remained with him and served him well. Afterward he entered the Harrisburg Academy, of which Professor Jacob F. Seller was the principal. This institution he attended for three years, taking the honors of the school for two terms. Under thorough instructors he paid special attention to mathematics, Latin, Greek, and history. Having made rapid progress in his studies, he, in 1884, took up teaching, and for three successive annual terms taught the Mount Vernon school in Hampden township; then for one term the Wormleysburg high school, and after that for one term was an assistant in the Harrisburg Academy. In 1886 he registered as a student-at-law with Stuart & Stuart, Carlisle, and engaged the greater part of his time at reading law until 1888, when he entered the law offices of his preceptors, and gave law his entire attention up to Sept. 9, 1889, when he was admitted as a member of the Cumberland county Bar. He immediately settled down to the practice of his chosen profession, and has kept studiously at it ever since. He is one of the most careful, persistent, determined lawyers at the Bar, and his rule is to push the business entrusted to him step by step without delay, until it is finally concluded. This industrious habit has won for him favor and prominence, and he is now rated as one of the ablest and busiest young attorneys at the Cumberland county bar. He has a large, valuable and well selected law library of about seven hundred volumes, to which he is constantly adding new books, as they are published, and as the need for them arises in his practice. He also has a fine miscellaneous library at his home, and is well-equipped for any professional or literary work that may come in his way. In September, 1901, he was elected a member of the faculty of the Dickinson School of Law, as professor of practice in the courts of common pleas, to the duties of which he devotes much time and labor.

On June 2, 1898, Mr. Swartz was married to Miss Margaret V. Kenyon, of Shippensburg, who formerly was a teacher in the public schools of that place. They live in a modest home on Walnut street, Carlisle, and have one child, a daughter, Helen, who was born March 27, 1902.