Young Keator moved to Moline, Illinois (another important railroad town) with his family by 1860.

Keator married 21 year old Emma Lyon in Chicago, and they would soon have a son, Frederic Keator Jr.[3] An Anglo-Catholic, Keating helped establish the Church of the Atonement in the developing Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago, which prompted him to leave his legal practice.

Keator served as the mission congregation's first priest-in-charge until 1896, shortly before it achieved full parish status.

Among his various civic activities in Washington, Bishop Keator served as president of the Tacoma Public Library board from 1907 to 1910 and also 1912 to 1923.

Simeon Arthur Huston was elected to succeed him and was duly consecrated, and would move the diocesan seat to Seattle.

Bishop Keator died of a heart attack on January 31, 1924, in New Haven, Connecticut, while visiting his son, who had become an instructor in electrical engineering at Yale.