Directory of confirmands for St. Paul Evangelical (Columbia, Ill.) from 1855-1938. Committee members: Miss D[olores] Fiege, Mr. Fred Harres, and the pastor, Rev. E. J. Westerbeck.

The church is known today as St. Paul United Church of Christ.

This book attempts to discover the names of the first Polish settlers in Illinois, when they came to Illinois and their stories when possible. Some left complete stories about themselves while others only a very small amount. The time period starts in 1818, the year Illinois became a state and ends in 1850. I found much more information between 1818 and 1850 then I thought I would so I cut the book off at 1850. The Polish settlers are divided into five different categories. 1. Polish Political Exiles from Russia. 2. Polish emigrants from mainly German occupied Poland. 3. Polish Jews. 4. People of Polish descent, those persons with a Polish ancestor. 5. Emigrants from an undetermined county whose last names look Polish.

Valentin Hofstetter was born 1 January 1774 in Weislingen, Alsace. His parents were Valentin Hofstetter and Anna Elisabethe Windstein. He married Marie Elisabeth Peter 25 December 1794. They had six children. Many of their descendants and relatives emigrated and settled mainly in Arkansas and Illinois.

Since its original release in 1939, Carl Schneider's The German Church on the American Frontier has been the premier published resource on the unique "Evangelischer Kirchenverein des Westens" (Evangelical Church Society of the West), 1840-66, which later assumed a wider denominational identity as the German Evangelical Synod of North America, the church of the Niebuhr family. Known eventually as the Evangelical Synod of North America, the group's ecumenical and irenic heritage contributed to mergers that resulted in the Evangelical and Reformed Church, 1934-1957, and thereafter in the United Church of Christ.