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Shultz, History of the Church of the Brethren in Indiana (1952), Parts 12 and 14, read whole at transcription strength; Winger, History of the Church of the Brethren in Indiana (1917), mother-church list, at search strength; the denomination course from the encyclopedia and National Park Service carriers named in the pass note
The people Chapman and Howard call "German Baptists" were the German Baptist Brethren — popularly Dunkards, for trine immersion — who took the formal name "The German Baptist Brethren Church" in 1871 and, at the Annual Conference of 1908, became the Church of the Brethren. In the early 1880s the body had divided three ways — Old German Baptist Brethren (1881), the Brethren Church (1882/83), and the continuing majority that renamed in 1908 — so a congregation organised in 1881 stands exactly at the split, and which branch it followed matters. Neither Chapman (1880, before the split) nor Howard (1907) says. The carrier that places this congregation inside the Church of the Brethren's own history is Shultz's 1952 denominational history, which files it in that church's congregational roster and its "Churches Disorganized" chapter and records its members transferring to the two South Bend Church of the Brethren churches; on that carrier, at moderate-strong strength resting on Shultz alone, its course is carried here as the main-body course. No carrier reached assigns it to any other branch.
The local root is older than the township church. Shultz carries a South Bend congregation — organised in the early 1840s on his dating; Winger's mother-church list dates it 1846, and the pair prints unmerged's register (C16) — which "formerly included all the southern and eastern parts of St. Joseph County," its territory divided some twenty years later, the southeast and northeast taking the name St. Joseph. Its early ministers named by Shultz include Elders Abraham Whitmer, Jacob Bowman and George Shively, and David Miller and Christian Wenger among the early preachers — the settler families this build's people record already carries.