Harvey Hostetler (1857 – 1939) was a Presbyterian Church Minister, genealogist, author, renown to us Descendants of Jacob Hochstetler because of the tireless research and composition of the famous (to us) work entitled "Descendants of Jacob Hochstetler, the immigrant of 1736" (Brethren Pub. House, 1912 - 1191 pages). He also authored "Hochstedler. Descendants of Barbara Hochstedler and Christian Stutzman" (Higginson Book Company, Mar 1, 1996 - 1391 pages) and "Ancestors and Descendants of Moses Hostetler: Original History by Rev. Harvey Hostetler of Family 6026 ; Historical Introduction by William F. Hochstetler of Family 2228" (Bookman Press, 1955 - 74 pages).

 

Although there were corrections to be made to his original Descendants of Jacob Hochstetler, the work was considered very complete, reliable, and has formed the backbone of most of our genealogical research and subsequent historical compilations. It gave us a heartbeat and formed the skeleton for our family’s loose but strong ties to each other, despite our diverse acculturations.

 

The Gospel Book Store located at 4900 Oak St. (PO Box 320) in Berlin, OH 44610 has continued to failthfully reprint these books for us and has kept the price extremely reasonable ($33.95 for the Jacob Hochstetler book and $36.95 for the Barbara Hochstetler book with 6.75% tax for OHIO RESIDENTS ONLY and shipping costs of $4.95 for one book and $6.50 for two books). These are LARGE BOOKS of heirloom nature so they'll be around for a long time for generations to come. Every H/H/H household should have one! You can order these books by either calling 1-330-893-2523 or by emailing infor@mygospelbookstore.com. They have an online bookstore that has most of their books available for order but it does not yet have the Jacob or Barbara books listed yet. They indicate that they will be offered there soon, so we will update this website when it happens.

 

Another alternative for purchase of the Harvey Hostetler book as well as countless other relevant and period specific books that relate directly to our heritage, the Mastoff Book Store offers an unparalleled variety! Since 1982 they've printed and/or published thousands of books and helped authors self-publish and achieve their goal of printing books to distribute and preserve information. Masthof is a family business that has grown from a basement print shop into a bookstore and full service digital and offset printing company. Their bookstore boasts thousands of titles featuring local history, life stories, Pennsylvania Dutch and much much more.

 

We at the JHFA strongly suggest the above bound versions over the digital version offered below because of its superior accuracy and the possessor’s ability to highlight it, bookmark it, and take it to places where wifi does not exist. Although this .pdf version is the scanned version of the same book, what you get for free is the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) copy of a very old book, which has not recognized the indexes and cross referenced page numbers making much of it a jumble. Paragraphing is not intact either so it's very hard to read.

 

With that said, this Google project has afforded us the ability to download a photocopy of the original book, which is readable except that every couple of words or so is missing a letter or two so you kind of have to guess what was written quite a few times.

 

PLEASE DO NOT JUDGE THE ORIGINAL WORK BY COMPARING IT TO THIS FREE SCANNED PUBLIC DOMAIN WORK. They are not anywhere close to an equivalent of each other! The hardcover may be a little more expensive but the genealogical importance it carries with it for generations to come, makes it worth it! At least that's how we feel about it and we make no commissions off the sale of these books!