My Genealogy Hound

REV. LEWIS EINSEL was born in Fairfield county, Ohio, October 22, 1813, to which place his parents, Henry and Barbara (Seitz) Einsel, emigrated from York county, Pa., in the year 1805. Lewis was reared on a farm, growing up as a country lad. At the age of twenty-three, having embraced the faith of the Evangelical church, he began preaching its doctrines and spent eight years in different localities in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois, actively engaged in the ministry. His health failing from his arduous labors, he was compelled to retire from active service in the church, and in 1844 he settled in Pickaway county, Ohio, and began farming and stock-raising and was also engaged a part of the time in merchandise. He lived there for twenty years, devoting himself mainly to the prosecution of his own affairs and rendering to his church as a local preacher such service as he could without endangering his already shattered health. He moved in 1862 to Tippecanoe county, Ind., continuing in the peaceful pursuits of agriculture, but more largely in stock-raising, serving as minister to local churches and doing evangelical work. In 1881 he moved to Holdrege, Phelps county, Nebr., where two of his sons and their families had previously settled, mention of whom is made in this volume. Mr. Einsel married in 1842 — the lady whom he selected to share his life’s fortunes being Catherine Dreisbach, a daughter of the Rev. John and Fannie (Eyer) Dreisbach. Mrs. Einsel was born in Union county, Pa., August 17, 1820. Her parents settled in Ohio in 1831, her father being a pioneer preacher of the Evangelical church, the fourth minister who was ordained to declare the doctrine of that denomination.

Mr. Einsel has devoted his life to the pursuit of his own affairs and to the ministry of his church. In each of these departments of endeavor he has met with the success which his earnest efforts have merited. He has lived an active life and has devoted his best energies to the good of his kind. He is a man of large experience and a wide range of knowledge, particularly on religious subjects, and when his tongue has been silenced from disease contracted in the cause of his Master his pen has still been busy expounding the great truths of Christianity to his fellow-men. To his church and the doctrines upon which it is founded he has ever rendered the loyalty of an earnest and faithful nature; and now, having almost finished the race and kept the faith, he still finds the chief source of his pleasures and the solace of his declining years in the study and contemplation of those same great truths which he spent the vigor of his manhood in declaring to the world.