HTC - Fact Sheet
HOLY TRINITY CHURCH
Boston, Massachusetts

Some facts to consider:..
The KRAMER Brothers are often called "The First German Catholics in Boston". Father Franz Nopper says in his parish history (1886) that Peter Joseph OOMANN from Ostfriesland emigrated at the age of 15, arriving in Boston in 1804, and "... had not found any other Germans in Boston at that time. He married an American Protestant, and so he was practically a stranger to those who settled here later". Peter OOMANN died at Carver Street 18 Sep 1860.

Thomas Piltz in Three Hundred Years of German Immigrants in North America cites the following data from the US Bureau of the Census:

Numbers of German-born Bostonians
1850 ---- 1,777
1860 ---- 3,202
1870 ---- 5,606
1880 ---- 7,396
1890 ---10,362
1900 ---10,739
1910 ---- 8,701
1920 ---- 5,915
1930 ---- 5,381
1940 ---- 3,851
1950 ---- 3,289

In German, Holy Trinity Church is "Heilige Dreifaltigkeits Kirche".

The first church, located in Boston's South End, was completed in 1844. On 27 May, 1877 (the Feast of the Holy Trinity) the "new" church on Shawmut Avenue was dedicated.

Holy Trinity parish may have been the first in New England to establish a parochial school, when, in 1844, Father Gerard Plathe began a school for both boys and girls. Later, schools were established in South Boston and Roxbury to educate the children of parishioners who had moved "to the suburbs".

Robert Sauer, in his history of the parish ("Holy Trinity German Catholic Church of Boston: A Way of Life", published in 1994), describes "The Home" in Roxbury as "a unique feature of Holy Trinity parish". Here, "people who had fallen on hard luck were kept in the parish and cared for by the parishioners, clergy and nuns attached to the parish." The "Home" was located in Roxbury in a large building on Highland, Fulda and Ellis Streets. Elderly widows and orphans lived here as well. There was also an elementary school attended by about 200 children from the neighborhood. On Sundays, the neighborhood Catholics attended Mass at St Elizabeth's Chapel at the "Home".

More facts and church records to come!!!

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Marge Reid--[email protected]

This page was updated 4 April 1999.

copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999 - Margaret V Reid