Washington County, Illinois
INTRODUCTION
The family is an involved one - with Hoffman marrying Hoffmann and much use of the same first name in the same family. This coupled with the fact that many of the records are in Ger-many and many, here, are in German, makes the facts hard to obtain and difficult to translate accurately into English. Another difficulty has been the fact that often our early ancestors had three or sometimes more, given names and, in many cases, went by the second or third rather than first.
My research has covered some five years of correspondence, many visits to cemeteries, perusal of church and county records, visits, phone calls, letters to Illinois and Ohio Historical Libraries and a visit to Lancaster, Ohio.
The original purpose of the project was to provide a source of information for our chil-dren, some of whom had expressed a desire to know more about their background, however, when I contacted members of the Hoffman family for information on their branch, many asked if they, too, could have the information, so I hope to be able to provide it for them also.
It has been a real joy to meet - mostly through letters and phone calls - so many of you, and I am most grateful for your help in giving me information about your families. So many have done so much - without you there would be no history. I had hoped to name each one of you but lest someone be accidentally forgotten, I am taking this means of saying "thank you". However, I will make one exception a very special thanks to my husband, without whose help, patience and understanding, I probably would have given up long ago.
If there are errors and I feel sure there are - I hope you will excuse them. I have tried to tell the story as told to me, but sometimes there are several versions and no way of knowing which is correct. In addition there are probably typographical errors.
My reward is in preserving for future generations, information, which with each passing year will be increasingly difficult if not impossible to obtain and which I hope will be of interest to other members of the family, so that you may know and appreciate a little more, your heri-tage.
Compiled by
Mrs. Edgar Reinhardt
(Bernice Green).[NOTE: dsw; I have left in place the page numbering of Bernice Rheinhardt but have increased the font size to 16 pt whereas this is in 12 pt. I have also used bold face and italics for the num-bers. Her numbers occur at the bottom of pages. Mine will occur at the top. The original and present type face is Times Roman]
Return to Contents