Burial, Marriage, and Baptism Record Transcriptions Copyright© by Gloria Dettleff
St. Boniface Catholic Church
402 Munster, Germantown, Illinois 62245
Throughout the Midwest during the early 1830s on through the 1850s and 1860s there was an influx of German immigrants. The reasons for this were many but two main reasons were religious freedom and the availability of good land to farm; land that resembled their homeland. These early Germans to the area that is now known as Germantown in Clinton County, IL were Catholics mainly from Hanover and Westfalia in what would become Germany. They established the first Catholic church in Clinton County. This church was first called St. Henry but soon became known as St. Boniface. The congregation actually began in about 1833 but the official founding is marked as 1856. For this reason the church's various records begin at different times.
All of the church records were transcribed from photocopies of the microfilmed original records. The majority of the burial transcriptions were completed in 2007 with some updates in 2008 using the original church records to supplement the poor quality and/or missing parts of the microfilm. The marriage and Baptism records were completed in 2013 with errors and omissions checked by Nancy Moss. All of these records are online and some now extend beyond 1930 at www.familysearch.org (external link) so if there is a question about a record it can be viewed online for resolving an issue or looking up a more recent record. Most of these records are written in Latin and were translated in good faith.
Most of the people who worshiped at this church lived in the surrounding area. As the population grew other cities were established and they got their own churches. In 1870 a statement written in German in the marriage records states that people in the surrounding areas would have to choose where they wanted to attend church. The areas mentioned were Aviston, Bartelso, Breese and Damiansville. The priests from the respective churches of these cities signed these statements. This page with the German statements appears on page 002 of the 1857-1888 Group. A big thank you to Ute and Ludwig Mösenfechtel for translating this page. The boundaries for the St. Boniface and St. Cecilia Parishes are defined in 1887.