St. John's Unitarian Church Records: Searching the History of one of Cincinnati's Oldest Churches

The Confirmation class of 1903 with Rev. H.G. Eisenlohr

The Archives and Rare Books Library holds the records of a few local churches, including St. John’s Unitarian Church, one of Cincinnati’s oldest houses of worship. This church’s rich history began in 1814 when Joseph Zaeslin (also spelled Zaeslein), a Moravian minister, organized a church for German immigrants in Cincinnati under the name The German Evangelical and Reformed Church. The history of this church is important to both Cincinnati’s religious history and to the history of Cincinnati’s German-American community. Continue reading →

Cazden German-Americana Collection Now Catalogued and Onsite

In 2002, the University of Cincinnati Libraries was bequeathed an outstanding collection of books from the personal library of Robert E. Cazden, professor emeritus of library science at the University of Kentucky and a noted scholar on German-American history and literature. The portion of these materials that pertain to German-American studies – more than 1400 volumes – has now been fully catalogued and added to the German-Americana Collection in the Archives & Rare Books Library at the University of Cincinnati. This acquisition maintains the position of the German-Americana Collection as one of the premier libraries on this subject in the world. Continue reading →

First German Baptist Church Records Finding Aid Now Available

The Constitution of the Synzygus Verein of the First German Baptist Church, which appears to have been adopted prior to 1915.

The records of the First German Baptist Church or Deutsche Baptisten-Kirche of Cincinnati have been fully processed and a finding aid is now available on the OhioLINK Finding Aid Repository. The collection holds various records for the church between 1880 and 1991 including church meeting minutes, financial records, and Sunday school attendance sheets. The material in the collection prior to the 1930s is primarily in German.

The records of the First German Baptist Church illustrate a small, but significant religious movement among Cincinnati Germans in the late nineteenth century. The First German Baptist Church was founded in Cincinnati in 1857, with the assistance of the Ninth Street Baptist Church, whose congregation saw the need for a Baptist missionary movement among German immigrants. Continue reading →