Hi, Everyone! I have made some recent serendipitous discoveries about my "Illinois" relatives. My DRENTEN folks started in Clinton County, IL or so I thought. It seems that the family actually came from the Lingen area in North Western Germany. They are included on the Emslander site and in Walter Tenfelde's book about immigrants from this area as DRENTE but my great-grandfather isn't listed. Plus, I had a different mother's name for him from his marriage record in St. Dominic's in Breese, Clinton County, IL. So I wasn't sure this was the correct family. While looking for someone else's ancestor, I stumbled on a Drenten as a witness to a marriage in the microfilmed records of the St. Louis Catholic church now called St. Joseph (Shrine of). It seems that this Drente family started out in Missouri in the 1840s and went to Illinois after 1865. While looking through these records I recognized many Clinton County names. I wanted to share this information and Dave Lossos has allowed my selected records, including Baptisms, Marriages and Burials to be posted on his Genealogy in St. Louis web site. Please keep a couple things in mind when you search through these records. I translated the Latin but I spelled all or most of the surnames exactly the way they appear in the records. This was a German Catholic parish and so the Latin words for John and Henry I put in as Johann and Heinrich. Some names I changed to the English and more recognizable forms such as Gesina for Chesina. I also left all the umlauts in so you can see the way the names were spelled originally. I also translated these records from copies of the microfilmed pages and some names were rather difficult to decipher. So, in other words, you must use a little imagination to find your people in some cases. Dave's site and these church records can be found at: <A HREF="http://genealogyinstlouis.accessgenealogy.com/">http://genealogyinstlouis.accessgenealogy.com</A> The Emsland site, hosted by Barbara Salibi, is located at: <A HREF="http://www.emslanders.com/">www.emslanders.com</A> Both of these sites are a wealth of information and both hosts welcome new data. May you be as lucky as I. Enjoy! Gloria Dettleff