He mastered the Swedish language, after having passed his seventieth year, chiefly that he might write a correct history of the first settlement of Swedes on the Delaware River below Philadelphia.  At the age of seventy-two he spent several months in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, and while there placed himself in communication with every prominent librarian of the country, besides scholars in Denmark, Holland, and Germany.  He personally inspected a great mass of documents and ancient volumes.  Yet the result of all this is contained in a manuscript of less than thirty large folio pages, literally crowded with invaluable data.  This was read before the Historical Society of the State of Delaware in 1874.  It has never been put in type, and is almost wholly made up of material which has no existence elsewhere in the English language.

A single instance will serve to show the minuteness and persistence of his investigations.  In one of the public libraries of Stockholm Mickley discovered an ancient Dutch manuscript signed by Peter Minuit.  No scholar within reach could master its contents.  The private secretary of the ambassador from Holland, who was appealed to, asserted beforehand that he “could read anything that ever was written in Dutch.”  Yet, after a long inspection, he frankly owned his inability to decipher a single word of it.  Mr. Mickley was determined to ascertain the contents.  As the document could not be bought at any price, and could not even be removed over-night from its place of keeping, he caused photographs to be taken of it.  One such copy was sent to a very learned acquaintance in Amsterdam, and another to a noted scholar at Leipsic.  In the course of subsequent travels he found accurate translations awaiting him from both sources.  The importance of the manuscript in this connection will be the more appreciated when it is remembered that Peter Minuit commanded the first expedition ever sent to the shores of the Delaware River.

Being thus by nature an historian, it is but natural that Mr. Mickley should have left behind him ample materials for telling the story of his own life.  From these we learn that the family name was originally Michelet.  It dates back to the French Huguenots who, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, settled in Zweibrcken, a Grerman province.  The first foothold of the family in this country was established in that portion of Pennsylvania which has for more than a century been thickly peopled by that enlightened and art-fostering sect, the Moravians.  It was from the Moravian influence that Joseph J. Mickley first experienced a fondness for music and its appropriate artistic surroundings.  He was born March 24, 1799, at South Whitehall, a township then in Lehigh County, but originally comprised in Northampton.  At the age of seventeen he went to Philadelphia as apprentice to a piano-maker.  At that time the method of building a piano-forte was as different from the advanced art of these days as was the instrument