The Harmer name is an unusual one, and that rarity has been a gift to the family historian. Wherever it surfaces — in a faded English parish register, on a worn headstone in the American Midwest, or in the muster roll of a Civil War regiment — there is a fair chance it leads back to a story worth telling. What follows traces the Harmers who crossed the Atlantic and made their lives in America, from a Quaker combmaker who stepped ashore in William Penn’s new colony, to the Sussex farming families who sailed west in the great migrations of the nineteenth century, and finally to the modern descendants whose curiosity gave rise to the Harmer Family Association itself.