I am researching the ancestry of Jacob Leighty(1748) of Fayette County, PA. Specifically, I am seeking to document his arrival in North America, and further back, an ultimate path to Signau in the Emmental, canton of Bern, Switzerland and the historical record that exists regarding the LICHTI name, most concisely illuminated by the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia.

I believe that the difficulty in tracing this line is due in large part to the change in spelling of the name.

It seems very likely to me that LICHTI (or one of its close variations) was anglicized to Leighty upon arrival in North America. The two are phonetically close, and there is commentary in the Genealogical and Personal History of Fayette County, Pennsylvania under several families that the second generation (Jacob (1748)'s children, my 3rd Great Grandfather Daniel's contemporaries) began using the anglicized names. However, it is notable that this work makes no mention of a generational name change with Jacob or his children, which indicates to me that Jacob made the change and never used the original form in Fayette County, or that it had already changed before he arrived there.