Washington County, Illinois
REDACTORS NOTE
A particular troubling occurrence has been a number of instances where she has used spellings with the ei combination as ie when the common German spelling was the reverse of what she em-ployed. She may be correct but anyone searching these files should use both variants (e.g. Schneider rendered as Schnieder). Another variant which appears as Wilke and may well be correct occurs in the church records at Lintorf as Wleke . I found no examples of Wleke in this book but I have church record from Lintorf stating that the family emigrated to the USA on the same date as my Wulf(mann) ancestors and the shipping records at New Or-leans show that they were in the same party. dsw)
She has included a number of parenthetical
statements and I have added to these. When I have done so, you will find my initials, dsw within the parentheses.
She attempted to be consistent with her abbreviations, but there were some vari-ants which we have
attempted to correct. The document was scanned into the computer and a number of simple and often
very obvious errors resulted. The program loaded the documents into Lotus Word Pro and it has now been
converted into Word Perfect and in MS Word .doc formats. Unfortunately the original indent format could
not be replicated but we have attempted to mimic as best we could. A typical scan would find everything
run together such as
"Caro-line(Lena)Maschoff-b.Dec.29,1885;d.June29,1956."
We have attempted to
insert blank spaces where it would be beneficial. Some spelling changes have been made since it is less
common to hyphenate words like proofread. Another problem is that spell checkers require some skill is
recognizing homophones and being able to spell.
With all genealogical histories one encounters the problem of spelling variants. Some of these occur
because the name was intentionally changed, others result from difficulty in reading the old script, some
from errors at the point of entry into N. America because of the immigration officer, some from Anglicization
as an attempt to more readily meld in and be identified with the new home country, and, some from carelessness
on the part of the recorder. In a few cases an indi-vidual was referred to differently in the various branches of the
family. A very confusing case results with the North American Patriarch of the Hoffmann family. He was
Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Hoffmann and part of the problem was of his and his wife's creation. They had a s
on who died in infancy whom they had named Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Hoffmann. They appar-ently liked the
name so much that a later son was named Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Hoffmann. Bernice Green calls the second
one Fred but my great grandmother who was his first child re-ferred to him as John according to Aunt Selma.
Bernice calls John's brother John Ernst Hoffman , John. To clarify the situation I have employed the full names
Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Hoff-mann I and Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Hoffmann II for those who had issue and
when she has said Fred I have said Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Hoffmann II. It seems unlikely that he was called
either Fred or John by his family. His daughter lived for 102 years and never spoke Eng-lish. She died in 1944 !
It seems improbable that she would have called her father John or Fred and probably questionable whether she
ever referred to him by his first or middle names. He was simply Vater or perhaps Opa or some other loving and
respectful name. She (Elizabeth Hoff-mann Wulfmann) used to haul castor beans by wagon to St. Louis from
New Minden and Plum Hill, Illinois. At the time, more than 50 % of the St. Louis population had German as their
native tongue. For many, New Minden was essentially a German-American community and the daily transactions
of life would have been performed in German or one of the dialects, Swabish or Plattdeutsch. It is interesting that
groups from Swabia and North Germany were represented here and in fact made up parts of the same Hoffmann
clan with a Hoffmann-Hoffmann marriage oc-curring at Lancaster Ohio which joined a Swabisher with a Lowlander
Hoffmann..
The dropping of an f or an n from Hoffmann occurred early and was probably intentional to dis-tinguish clearly
between siblings and their families. This is nicely demonstrated by the genealogy of the Swabish Hoffmanns on
page 7 of Bernice's text. Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Hoffmann II may have
dropped the second n to distinguish
himself from his father but his brothers did the same thing and if nothing else, they had lots of children to confuse
who was who (then and now). I have retained the second n for Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Hoffmann II to help make
distinc-tions from his brothers.
Confusion in the Pister family arose from the fact that the father and son were named Jacob and in the obituaries
published in German for the father the name was spelled Jakob but those in English employed Jacob (even when
the source of the obituaries were identical). In the church archives in Webster Grove, Missouri the two are filed together.
The names Georg and George are obviously equivalent but Bernice has apparently faithfully avoided the temptation to
Angli-cize Georg.
David S. Wulfman
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