Descendant of Elmont family tracks down church records

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It was simply curiosity that took hold of George Bauer one day in the summer of 2016 inside his home in Lees Summit, Missouri. But despite getting the itch to explore and research his family’s history, Bauer had no solid information on their origin or where they came from.

“The only information I had on my family was contained in a letter that my father sent to my cousin Joyce in 1978,” George said.

In that letter, it said that his grandfather was born in Fosters Meadow, New York. The Bauers first arrived at Fosters Meadow from Bavari, in the 19th century. Henry Bauer, the family’s third son, was born in what would later become Elmont and lived as a farmer along Dutch Broadway. Many in the area still recognize his service to the Belmont Hook and Ladder Company and his 48 years on the Elmont School District Board of Education.

But while those are the facts on Henry that are echoed by the Fosters Meadow Heritage Center, George found his focus shifting to his great uncle’s service as a trustee at the St. Paul’s German Presbyterian Church on Elmont Road, a church that the Bauers helped found when they arrived from Europe. More specifically, he found decades of missing records in the church’s history.

“I knew if I could locate the church records I would find more about the Bauer's and St. Paul's,” George said.

But one large obstacle stood in George’s way, the St. Paul’s fire of 1905. As the Hempstead Sentinel and Long Island Farmer newspapers recounted three unknown men approached the church building one night and attacked Joseph Denton, the guard on duty at the time, knocking him out with a surprise ambush.

“I ran to George Case’s barber shop with my face bleeding and asked him to fix up my wounds, telling him as fast as I could what had happened,” Denton said in an LI Farmers article on March 17, 1905.

By the time they got back to the church, it was already on fire and burned down by morning despite efforts to extinguish the flames by neighbors. George Bauer had believed that the old church records were destroyed in the fire, which must have prompted the building of the new St. Paul’s that stands today. But that wasn’t the case.

As he hunted down records from the church and Presbyterian Historical Society, Bauer learned that the Bauers had worked on the building of the new church in 1904, which was moved to a new site days before the old building burned down. Realizing that the church’s records must have been saved in the new building, George reinvigorated his search last year and was eventually able to find the records, which had been uploaded to Ancestry.com. He shared his findings with the Foster Meadows Heritage Center.

“He has helped us out immensely,” Raymond Hoeffner, of the Foster Meadows Heritage Center, said. “So little was known about St. Paul’s, until George started his work.”

The records are split between three books, with links to them available on the Fosters Meadow Heritage Center’s website.